more than a meter away,
I sense the light as if it were a foreign
and endangered thing,
flesh over flesh in flesh under flesh,

and I think that it is only now that I begin to see it well,
only now is it binding as well as it should be,
a matter thicker than metal and heavier than water,
otherwise how could it sink to such great depths?

but what eye clearer than mine sees the light in itself,
with its black veins ready to burst,
darker than a placenta thrown in the garbage,
heavier than mercury when it explodes
and upon seeing it, what eyes will rotate
around it as if around an asphalt bucket?

with an eye such as mine you can’t see the light burning
instead you see its shabby structure,
its weight heavier than that of darkness.
only through the blind and useless eye, you see the unseen light,
the light which rots on Sundays in the yards,
too tired to go away,

the tiny wiry eye flowing after the light
sees what the seeing eye has never seen,
it’s not the matter which is heavy, but the light pressing it,
the eyes that break down are the only ones to see it,
who only sees the light does not see it.

yet who does not see it gathers it in big barrels,
over which they place burdock and stones
and keep it over the years, until it accumulates at the bottom
and hardens like rosin.
one day, in the astronomers’ telescopes
it will look like a dark and thick oil,
which they will use to rub their bodies.

and maybe then the eye, which only brings
bad luck to sight, will disappear.
when he sees with the skin, man will no longer be man
and the religion of retina will have long disappeared.
as long as god exists, he can’t be seen with sight
but then he won’t get away from us anymore.

he is part of the light that
the usual eye can’t see,
yet which my almost blind eyes sees.
from light upwards, things become harder and harder
and while you go up, you can’t go down anymore.
the great difficulty is in fact the easiness,
upon rising, you become the heaviness of the other world,
you crash in nothingness like a bag full of boulders.

man becomes heavy in the other world
because of the light: the venous light
the great luminous Carpathians from under the chest,
the sombre lights which thicken his bones.
who said man is not light?
truly man is light in the unseen,
a clot of lights, very weak ones.
few will be the things which
we haven’t seen because of the light,
this is only because light does not help us see
and anyway I have a bad eyesight
and through my limited glasses
I rather see the unluminous light.
and when the flesh will turn blind, they will also see
the fleshy light because of which we rot.

Ioan Es. Pop
translated by Flavia Hemcinschi