Wheel With a Single Spoke Read online

  Autumn Love

  Autumn is here, cover my heart with something,

  the shadow of a tree, or better, the shadow of you.

  Sometimes I’m afraid I will see you no more,

  that my sharp wings might grow up to the clouds,

  that you’ll hide within an odd eye,

  and it will shut under a wormwood leaf.

  Then I step toward the rocks and fall silent,

  I pick words up and drown them in the ocean.

  I whistle the moon to rise and make it

  into a great emotion.

  THE RIGHT TO TIME

  (Dreptul la timp, 1965)

  The Right to Time

  I.

  Even rocks sprouted that day,

  with winter at zenith above the earth

  and within the shell of spherical hours

  beat rock-smasher, Phoenix wings.

  And the air

  suddenly compacted,

  suddenly petrified like a frozen sea

  that crushes within itself

  corpses

  rising toward the surface.

  In that earthshaken February, battle-ready,

  the land requested its natural right

  to time,

  like color for the eye

  and the bud of hearing

  on the eardrums.

  In that earthshaken February, battle-ready,

  with the thick whistle toward the future

  of anchors thrown,

  strength knotted in pleats of air,

  the hawks’ throats suddenly blocked.

  And the girders of the sky, in place,

  were covered with white wings

  imagining air yet to be,

  raised to another, more worthy foundation.

  In that earthshaken February, battle-ready,

  the eyes of rifles

  gazed long, with bullets,

  at our head and raised chest,

  their lords not imagining time had frozen

  their bodies clenched within a block

  ever denser, ever deeper.

  Even rocks sprouted that day,

  with Winter at zenith and glistening.

  A veil of death covered dreams over,

  when death killed nothing but itself.

  II.

  A rush of white clouds, a rush of long clouds

  drove each second.

  In earthshaken February,

  a woman gave birth into the world,

  her son receiving his right to time.

  She shot into the air

  the stone arrow

  of a scream.

  The child’s body rose

  heavy and sure, like the moon,

  from seawater.

  And a horizon appeared, of women

  who covered the globes of their earthly bellies

  with black aprons.

  A horizon appeared, of pregnant women

  who gazed upon her.

  A woman gave birth into the world.

  In February, under the wheel of freezing wind,

  birth pains embraced her,

  like a man much too strong,

  with arms of lead.

  A rush of white clouds, a rush of long clouds

  drives each second, strikes them,

  thins them . . .

  A second may meander

  through forges, cables,

  walls, along railways it meanders

  it finds a woman’s eye and shines through,

  it finds a woman’s cheek and colors it,

  it finds a woman’s mouth and makes it arc,

  it finds a woman’s scream and makes it into

  a pillar of the sky.

  And a horizon appeared, of women

  who covered the globes of their earthly bellies

  with black aprons.

  A horizon appeared, of pregnant women

  who gazed upon her.

  The child’s body, heavy and sure

  continued to rise

  like a heart drumming,

  like a planet breaking away

  from a sun.

  In February, under the wheel of freezing wind,

  the great flag of snow

  fell, dew-wet, to the earth.

  And the soldiers’ hobnailed boots

  tore the flag apart, in rhythm

  and iron runners from sleds with

  brass bells

  sliced the flag into bandages,

  for the reddened temples,

  battered shoulders,

  and gunshot chests

  of those who stood guard.

  But a woman gave birth into the world.

  In February,

  her child received

  his right to time,

  just as great questions receive

  their answer

  in history.

  And a horizon appeared, of women

  who covered the globes of their earthly bellies

  with black aprons.

  A horizon appeared, of pregnant women

  who smiled, heavy and trusting.

  III.

  But then the woman felt

  her arms could not hold the boy

  any more than yours could lift

  a river.

  She felt him break away

  from her breast

  as words do

  from the mouth.

  The warmth of his being

  – she felt –

  rose up on the warmth of her body

  toward petrified clouds.

  And all of this seems

  unchangeable,

  the way you cannot temper

  an event

  that took place in the past.

  The woman then felt

  that her son ran glistening

  toward the great toothed wheels

  of the seasons,

  that he threw his shadow onto them,

  whipping them,

  that the biting lashes turned the cogs

  with a high whistle,

  and winter threw its frozen bodies

  onto the carcass of spring leaves,

  and spring threw its shivering trees

  onto the swollen summer ocean,

  and the sun of summer, slipping, hit

  and shook the fruits of autumn loose.

  And autumn drove its prow

  like an icebreaker

  into the white quick of winter,

  and parted and crushed

  and shattered and broke it.

  The woman shot a glistening

  arrow into the air,

  a cry of joy

  for her son.

  February watched over him.

  It touched his white and shining shoulder

  like one who draws sound

  from a harp,

  and truly, there he was.

  Its hands caressed him, its sight,

  hearing, smell, taste,

  its everything at once,

  and he was alive and unhurt.

  February watched over him.

  And embraced him

  the way the heart does its blood

  and the mind ideas, so was he, complete,

  and he received his natural right

  to time,

  the way the open eye receives

  the face of things that laugh or cry.

  February watched over him.

  Bas-relief with Heroes

  The young soldiers sit in a glass case

  the way they were found, shot in the forehead,

  so they could be seen, they sat in a glass case,

  holding their last movements,

  the profile, arm, knee, their last movements,

  when they were shot by surprise in the forehead

  or between the shoulder blades with a flame more fragile

  than the finger of a child pointing at the moon.

  They left behind an empty barracks

  that sme
lled like ankle-wraps, cigarette butts, like a closed window.

  Wooden suitcases filled the barracks

  and rattled their iron handles

  like the moon rattles its iron handles

  just before it’s opened

  to look for the old letters and old photographs

  of time.

  The young soldiers were smeared with wax

  on their faces and hands, to shine,

  rubbed with wax to shine, rubbed with wax,

  and set exactly as they were the moment

  when life broke and death swallowed the moment.

  They are still, never not shining,

  and we look at them like we might look at a moon

  rising from the middle of the square.

  For our sake, now that we are the same age,

  even though they’ve spent many years inside the case,

  for our sake, we who have caught up with and passed them,

  who have a heart that beats, and memory,

  a fresh, utterly fresh memory,

  the young soldiers sit in a glass case

  and mock each other constantly

  as though they were alive.

  Enkidu

  My friend Enkidu is dead. Together, we killed lions.

  from the EPIC OF GILGAMESH

  I.

  Look at your hands and rejoice, for they are absurd.

  And look at your feet, in the evening, as you stand straight

  and hang toward the moon.

  I may be too close for you to see me,

  but even this is not nothing.

  I will become distance, to fit your eyes,

  or a word, with sounds the size of ants,

  to fit your mouth.

  Touch your ear and laugh and wonder at your touch.

  I ache, even in the brief transit.

  I stretched my gaze until it hit a tree,

  and there it was!

  Look at my shoulders, and tell yourself they are the

  strongest you’ve seen, aside from grass and bison,

  who are like that for no reason.

  My shoulders shift distance, like a leather bag

  pushed by a windmill.

  This is why when lights I have not touched

  burn the backs of my eyes

  a gentle blue pain passes above the crown of my head

  in place of the sky.

  And if I ache with rivers,

  rocks, a length of ocean,

  just enough for everything to be my bed,

  never enough to fit my thought’s

  eternal expansion, oh, then there’s no way I’ll know

  how you also ache, and I am not the one

  to whom I speak.

  II.

  So something would exist between us – maybe

  me – I baptized what I had done,

  wounding myself,

  always making myself smaller, always dying,

  by words from my own lips.

  And the great pain, I called it blue

  for no reason, or just because that’s how

  my lips smiled.

  I ask you whether you, smiling,

  would call another pain the same?

  Surely, the height I threw away from my sight,

  like a spear never to return,

  you caressed differently, because your hands,

  my twins, are absurd, and we should

  rejoice in these words passing

  from one mouth to another like an invisible river,

  for they do not exist.

  O, friend, how is your blue?

  III.

  A game of passes, some fast, some slow,

  before my eye and with me creating the

  trees, stones, and river,

  over my slower body

  dragged along by thought, like goats at evening,

  by a rope.

  Time, alone everywhere, myself,

  and after that.

  IV.

  And when everything is erased, like seas inside a shell,

  there’s nothing anymore, except in the eyes of those

  who are not, the passage of pain into the passages

  of time, O, my friend, when I am like someone,

  I will not be, because one thing like another

  does not exist.

  What is unique is in pain, measured like eddies

  in the mountains, the passage of time,

  knowing it is alone,

  changing the names of surrounding things.

  V.

  Whatever is not limitless is,

  it travels everywhere, encountering the wide marks

  I call Time.

  Whatever is not everywhere is, it swallows

  my legs up to the knees, beats the elbow of my heart,

  on my mouth it dances.

  What is not timeless is, the way a memory is.

  Like the vision of hands, it is,

  like the hearing of eyes.

  VI.

  I die with every thing I touch,

  with rotating stars, with sight;

  with every shadow I cast over the sand,

  a little less soul remains, a thought

  stretches a bit further; I look

  at everything as though I see death, only seldom

  do I forget, and then I create dances

  and songs from nothing, shrinking myself and pulling out

  my throbbing temples, to turn them into crowns of myrtle.

  VII.

  Come out of the tent, friend, so we can be face-to-face,

  can look at each other, be quiet together, always asking

  whether the other is,

  and how he senses himself.

  Game of tumbling, with stones,

  shaken out of somewhere, toward somewhere else.

  Ars Poetica

  I taught my words to love,

  I showed them my heart

  and would not give up until their syllables

  did not start to beat.

  I showed them trees

  and what words wouldn’t rustle

  I hanged, without pity, from the branches.

  In the end, words

  needed to resemble both me

  and the world.

  Then

  I came to me,

  I braced myself between two banks

  of a river,

  to present a bridge,

  a bridge between a bull’s horn and grass,

  between black stars of light and earth,

  between the temple of a woman’s head and a man’s,

  letting words travel over me

  like racing cars, electric trains,

  only so they could cross faster,

  only so they would learn to transport the world,

  from itself,

  to itself.

  The Chariot

  for Mihai Eminescu

  A chariot whistles across the field

  of my moments.

  Four horses pull two warriors.

  One has his eyes on leaves, the other,

  his eyes in tears.

  One lodges his heart ahead, in the horses,

  the other drags it behind, over stones.

  One holds reins in his right hand,

  the other, sadness in his arms.

  One is beset by his weapons,

  the other by his memories.

  A chariot whistles across the field

  of my moments.

  Four black horses pull two warriors.

  One lodges his life in eagles,

  the other in the tumbling wheels,

  and the horses run, until their muzzles shatter

  the moment,

  they run beyond, they run far beyond

  and vanish.

  Savonarola

  Savonarola came to me and said:

  Let’s burn all the trees on the bonfire of vanities,

  let’s burn all the grass, wheat, and corn
,

  and make everything a little simpler.

  Let’s shatter the rocks, let’s pluck

  the rivers from their beds and make

  everything simpler, a lot simpler.

  Let’s renounce our legs,

  for walking is vanity.

  Let’s renounce our sight,

  for the eye is vanity.

  Let’s renounce our hearing,

  for the ear is vanity.

  Let’s renounce our hands

  and make everything simpler,

  a lot simpler!

  Savonarola came to me in a dream,

  like a scar deep in the brain of the world.

  He came to me in a dream

  and I woke up shouting and screaming.

  Bas-relief with Lovers

  Again, we are ourselves no more,

  we know no more where we begin

  nor where we end, in given space,

  placed on the pillar of these seconds.

  Again, our bodies shaped in bas-relief

  exist out from us, that is,

  just one half of us can move,

  that side turned to the world.

  Again, all is centered on the eye,

  the brow, just the cheek,

  just the arm outstretched is all,

  whatever else will cease to be.

  Inscribed within a circle,

  we know no more where we begin

  nor where we end, in given space,

  placed on the pillar of these seconds.

  Song

  The present is made only of memories.

  What was, no one truly knows.

  The dead constantly trade

  names, numbers, one, two, three . . .

  There is only what will be,

  only happenings yet unhappened,

  hanging from an unborn branch

  half a phantom . . .

  There is only my frozen body,

  final, stony, and feeble.

  My sadness hears how unborn dogs

  bark at unborn people.

  Only they will truly be.

  We who live these moments,

  we are a nighttime dream,

  a svelte, scampering millipede.

  To the right, and then to the left

  listed the demented skiff,

  depending on how I embraced you,

  or on the smell of algae or mint.

  It scribed a flashing alphabet,

  in cuttlefish, water, and gar.

  Its words were only four:

  I am, you are . . .

  And gallantly they seemed to drown

  in the glare, monotonous, bland,

  or lazily through lazy clouds

  they crossed the Flying Dutchman . . .

  Beloved zigzag, almost dreamed,

  with sargasso seas below,

  a heart free from the slavery