In a room among newspapers from far-away climes
like a tame animal like a marvelous man you love yourself
                                                        ­ and sit on the edge
     of the bed with your palms on your knees
or absolved of birth and death you stroke your pumice-stone
                                                    ­                                              cheek
until the sun crosses the other side
next to the photograph of the happy child who is piddling on
                                                              ­                           a blue shore
Then every thing returns regroups
as though in a boiling fog in which things are mended
among the obscure plantations of chance And alongside
a woman carefully hangs out the clothes of the drowned lover and
                                                             ­                             speaks to them
the one who still seeks you in the black bones of the
                                                             ­                                   butterflies
And while you wander lost through the mists of a powerful
                                                        ­                                         manhood
past the spades left on the fresh molehill
or gaze at the swaying of the two stakes ****** into the shore
or lie down on the ground and the wind covers your face with
                                            thistles brought who knows whence
a great sadness brings back the lunar landscape of her tired
                                                                ­                            shoulders
and there are no more words but her whisper are things which
                                                                ­                                        settle
everywhere filling the ripped silence of the train's screech
her whispers are the water gathered over the prints of her
                                                                ­                  soles after the last rain
but a simple turn of the key is enough for you to be able to hear
the slow flowing of time by your dampened socks
or the heavy breathing of the roots
and again you dream the blue shore  at the end of the river
on which we ruminate our enchanted abandonment

Gellu Naum, Vasco da Gama and other pohems, Humanitas Publishing House, Bucharest, 2007