Wheel With a Single Spoke Read online

  Not because I think things

  won’t be hurt

  but because I’d be whipping for no reason.

  I won’t stick my tongue out at you

  so you won’t think I want to taste you.

  I’m just talking to you.

  It’s like sticking my tongue out halfway.

  If you understand me – great.

  Today, so long as you understand me, I’ll be happy.

  Even delighted.

  But only today.

  If you don’t understand anything, I’ll be sad

  and toward the end of the evening, – melancholic.

  But not past this evening,

  because at midnight

  an angel is coming.

  He will tell me:

  – I have come to transform you!

  – So transform me, I’ll tell him.

  And he will, he’ll do it.

  After that, I’ll go over to a horse

  and say:

  – Horse, I have come to transform you.

  – Hee-haa, it will answer,

  but I won’t know if I should

  transform it

  or even if it wants me to.

  And I will not know whether I am to it

  what the angel is to me.

  – I have come to transform you, horse.

  – Hee-haa, hee-haa, answers the horse.

  5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0

  From that revolting grub

  came my will to write poetry.

  From that came the habit

  of enjoying the fact that my poetry can express

  misery.

  I was in the army, and being a private

  with Private Ionel Vianu,

  and being still up during a break,

  we escaped from our bunk beds

  when look, he

  handily found a grub.

  It had orange folds, it had

  warts, if you can imagine it.

  Hairy it was, and it had warts.

  Illumined warts . . .

  (Here God erased a good line.)

  I’d better stop this talking.

  But I can’t,

  I want to justify myself.

  Private Ionel Vianu let it run

  from one palm into his other,

  the revolting grub.

  Watching it made me sick

  and repulsed when I looked at it

  and very very uneasy it made me

  and I burped bile, the grub.

  The soldier said to me:

  – Do you see how it runs from one hand to the other?

  Like the stain of a shadow, the soldier said to me.

  It ran like a shadow’s stain

  from one palm to another.

  Like the stain of a shadow!

  I repeated it, too:

  – Like the stain of a shadow.

  I utterly hated the grub,

  but it ran from one palm into another,

  from one of the soldier’s palms into the other

  like the stain of a shadow.

  This is where I get the habit

  from loathing for the grub, I get the habit,

  the stupid habit of writing poetry.

  Like the stain of a shadow,

  the soldier told me.

  Like the stain of a shadow,

  the soldier responded.

  Beauty-Sick

  I won’t say it was lucky

  I met you.

  I’ll only say it was a miracle.

  Do your best not to die, my love,

  try to not die if you can.

  Me, my life is gone,

  you, your luck is gone.

  I’ll say no more than this,

  the two of us lived

  on a ball of earth.

  Ars Amandi

  I want to be him.

  He wants to be a tree.

  Trees want to be dogs,

  dogs want to be birds.

  Birds want to be stones,

  stones want to be fish.

  Fish want to be clouds,

  clouds want to be fields.

  Fields want to be horses,

  horses want to be grass.

  I want to be grass.

  And If

  If stones were bones,

  ah, how they’d grow

  with budding fingers . . .

  If birds were air,

  only feathers would I breathe,

  only feathers . . .

  And if waves

  were oceans,

  ah, how we would go

  ah, look how we would go.

  EPICA MAGNA

  (Epica magna, 1978)

  Paean

  Feelings don’t have to be understood, –

  just lived.

  Pigs don’t have to be understood, –

  just eaten.

  Flowers don’t have to be understood, –

  just smelled.

  That bird doesn’t have to be understood, –

  leave it alone;

  don’t make your heart into a branch,

  don’t drink its air with your breath,

  the air below its wings . . .

  We don’t need above all to understand, –

  we just above all must be;

  but we above all must have been,

  really above all to have been.

  Wheel with a Single Spoke

  It smelled like a corpse from another planet.

  Out of the horse’s spinal cord

  some grass grew, and an egret.

  It smelled like a corpse from another planet.

  I shoved my heart into a stone

  as my mother would plunge her hands into chocolate

  when she cooked us air

  thinking a bird would suffocate.

  She’d tell us a story,

  a story about a king

  who used sunrays like a cane,

  who saw a naked goddess in the light

  and suddenly, wham!

  Lord, what a smell!

  It smelled like a corpse from another planet.

  A tender nonbeing protected us like granite.

  And all this happened in the time

  the wheel had only one spoke

  and it wasn’t called a wheel,

  it was called a line.

  Soldier Oedipus

  If you weren’t afraid to be born

  you won’t be afraid to die.

  The lamb is not for eating

  or sacrifice.

  It is a seed

  becoming a ram.

  Take the blood-dirty sword out of your tent.

  Take the dead man out of your tent.

  His flesh is rusting.

  The star

  smells like a newborn child.

  Wash yourself, –

  seed and bullet . . .

  What the animals left after they ate,

  what they let fall out of their behinds, –

  that’s what you are

  and not even.

  Phosphorescent snot, you traitor,

  snot

  you can see in the starless dark

  night and day.

  No one’s neglect are you,

  no one’s non-desire are you.

  To shoot at your own land

  without knowing it’s your own mother.

  You are not excused from this mess,

  you stillborn fetus

  by the sword the virgins pissed on.

  Your weapon is the stain of light.

  The mercy of spilled blood

  will never adorn you.

  We curse you:

  May you be held by your own crime,

  may you hold in your arms the rotting

  dog of my heart.

  May you never take part in death.

  When you are thirsty

  may you suck on a gravestone

  the eye of a dead child.

  Fire will be your shadow,

 
cold will be your fire!

  May you burn without death,

  you

  who shoots his own land,

  even if you didn’t know it was your mother.

  May you survive your sin!

  May you crave milk,

  and drink stones.

  . . . And may the gentleness you ruined

  make you gentle and fresh as a blade of grass,

  unhappy soldier, Daddy’s

  dear and beloved,

  Daddy’s little soldier,

  dear and tragic and beloved.

  Self-Portrait

  I am nothing but

  a bloodstain

  that speaks.

  Eye Squared

  I can’t believe a bird can fly,

  that it can glide on what is not,

  or that you are in love with me

  and I’m not even your dog.

  An air of loss exists

  and a stillness of black goats,

  but neither have I inhaled

  since I became your dog.

  Don’t you have anyone else to hit

  with that clang yanking out its own statue?

  Here, boy, here I am, hit me!

  Only I am your dog.

  Oration

  Nothing more ambiguous than a straight line,

  nothing more painful than a wedding

  . . . and more foreign than a party

  on New Year’s

  nothing is.

  Nothing more free than sleep,

  nothing more liberating than weariness

  and compared to the young couple

  who yesterday I saw kiss,

  nothing is more of the past . . .

  Nothing more durable than air

  and nothing more invisible.

  Forward Movement

  for Arthur Lundkvist

  I am a locomotive steaming

  out of evaporating rails.

  I am a bird flying

  out of petrifying air.

  I am a word spoken

  that leaves behind a body.

  I am time leaping

  from a crystallizing hour.

  I am grass

  bent under verdancy.

  I am hunger running

  ahead of a gut.

  I am one born

  from a mother so true

  as I am untrue.

  To Feed Me from Your Hand

  You’re distant now, Mama,

  you don’t feed me from your tit,

  but your hand.

  We’re eating in the house now, Mama,

  we’re eating in the dining room.

  Your breast has turned to wood, Mama,

  a table and glasses, the nipple of your tit.

  Give us drink, Mama, to me and my friends,

  and after we have whet our thirst for life

  give us death, O Mama.

  Haiku

  A dog bites me,

  ah, I peer through him

  as through a window.

  Another Haiku

  Darkening dark

  see

  the gates of light.

  Tableau with Blind People

  Night starts to fall

  over a house in the country

  with a wooden table in the backyard

  where they sit and drink and talk –

  my parents and someone else’s

  the mayor and stable hand

  schoolteacher and priest

  and some more people who sit and drink and talk.

  At the same time

  superimposed upon them

  a man with a black cloak,

  wounded by history

  or whatever else,

  goes off in the dusk over the field

  getting smaller as he goes

  dying as night falls.

  Snippets of talk, clatter of forks and knives

  glugs of pouring wine

  and above everything

  the schoolteacher shouting louder than anyone else:

  – At the end of the day, what is life about?

  And the priest shouting louder than anyone else:

  – There are no signs, prayer is pointless.

  And the mayor shouting louder than anyone else:

  – Everything we see is the same! Always the same!

  Superimposed upon the people at the table

  crossing, it seems, through each one

  in the field black with evening,

  a man with a black cloak goes off,

  his thoughts audible across the field:

  I was born in the worst century possible,

  I lived in the strangest heart possible!

  That’s how his thoughts sounded

  while he got smaller

  like a black spot on a black spot

  getting larger.

  Heavy air and calm heat

  beside the table in the yard, covered in shadow

  untouched by the gasoline lamplight,

  a mute rustle in the lantana bush.

  A shiny eye with a matte shine,

  an eye as big as the lantana bush

  opens shiny and matte and closes.

  The people at the table have their backs turned;

  a second of silence then wine glugs into glasses.

  Superimposed upon the rectangle of the table

  far away, crossing the field

  and cutting through the table at the same time,

  a man with a black cloak

  and behind the man with a black cloak

  a hectare of black field opens suddenly,

  an eye shining and opaque and black

  closes as quickly as it opened

  while the man goes off with his back turned.

  A dog tied to an oak in the yard

  yaps banging his chain,

  the oak’s trunk opens

  and a shining black eye blinks.

  – Quiet, damn dog, shouts the stable hand,

  and throws a mug at him.

  A star widens like a pond

  behind the man with a black cloak,

  and a boulder at the gate

  opens a shining black eye and closes it.

  – I live in a strange heart, the man thinks,

  one is the attention of zero,

  two and three and four and five

  are nothing other

  than the non-attention of number one,

  thinks the man with a black cloak, further off,

  while behind him

  the black horizon opens an eye,

  immense, shining, and black,

  and closes it.

  My parents and someone else’s

  sit at a wooden table in the yard

  of a house in the country

  and drink with the priest and mayor

  with the schoolteacher and stable hand

  and whoever else is at the table,

  and superimposed upon them

  a man in pain with a black cloak

  crosses the field toward night.

  Some speak, another thinks,

  while large eyes open and

  close behind them

  and evening decomposes into night

  and their meal in the yard never ends

  and his walk with a black cloak in the field

  never ends

  and night runs into night

  ever thicker, ever thicker.

  Wedding Toast

  Not how I am am I

  but how you are am I

  Not green, not yellow, not red,

  but very green, very yellow, very red,

  Not how I am am I

  but how you are am I

  Not purple, not very purple,

  but very, very purple.

  Not how I am am I

  but how you are am I

  a kind of you am I

  that you would not let be me.

  IMPERFECT WORKS

  (Operele imperfecte, 1979)

&
nbsp; Lesson on the Cube

  You take a piece of stone,

  carve into it with blood,

  polish it with Homer’s eye,

  plane it with the sun’s rays,

  until the cube is perfect.

  Then you kiss the cube countless times

  with your mouth, with others’ mouths,

  especially with the mouth of la infanta.

  Then you take a hammer

  and bust a corner off the cube.

  Everyone, but everyone, will say:

  – What a perfect cube this would have been

  if that corner wasn’t broken!

  Hourglass

  for Ioan Flora

  I.

  The eagle’s wing had a round hole,

  like a ring of gold too tight

  to crown the emperor’s forehead.

  Through it nothing went toward nothing,

  no one shone through its wing,

  the no one who longs for nonexistence.

  The eagle rose through the air, timidly

  as if through the breath of a child, –

  falling, first it became a turtle, then

  white balls of hail, then

  only the cold of him remained, only the cold.

  When a hole was made

  by its body into the earth

  the smack of its fall

  no one heard;

  the grass was green and fresh,

  its plumage changed color, to green.

  Worms from the bowels of the earth

  came to ask:

  – Do you want magma or lapis lazuli?

  – No, it responded, I want air,

  air, I want air.

  Worms from the bowels of the earth said:

  – We have sand, can you breathe sand?

  – No, I cannot breathe sand,

  I have nothing to breathe sand with.

  Worms from the bowels of the earth said:

  – If you had a pyramid, could you breathe sand,

  if you had a pyramid, could you breathe sand?

  – No, the eagle responded,

  I have no pyramidal thought, the eagle said,

  I have no pyramidal thought.

  – Then what do you have? asked worms from the bowels of the earth,

  then what do you have, what do you have, then?

  – I don’t, said the eagle, I don’t have anything;

  my only property is absence,

  a round hole in my wing instead of a sun.

  I don’t, said the eagle, I don’t,