Something black somewhere      in the vistas of his heart.

Tulips from Tates teazed Henry in the mood
to be a tulip and desire no more
but water, but light, but air.
Yet his nerves rattled blackly, unsubdued,
&suffocation; called, dream-whiskey'd pour
sirening. Rosy there

too fly my Phil&Ellen; roses, pal.
Flesh-coloured men&women; come&punt;
under my windows. I rave
or grunt against it, from a flowerless land.
For timeless hours wind most, or not at all. I wind
my clock before I shave.

Soon it will fall dark. Soon you'll see stars
you fevered after, child, man, & did nothing -
compass love to the pencil-torch!
As still as his cadaver, Henry mars
this surface of an earth or other, feet south
eyes bleared west, waking to march.

from  *The Dream Songs

We are the night ocean filled
With glints of light. We are the space
Between the fish and the moon,
While we sit here together.

my cells have their own theories and fruits of dying
even porcelain dreams
when I am with you I enter the tunnel of vision
I can see better what happens with fused from confused
me and him trapped in the asylum of gestures
somnabulists through our own skins
while they are busy scrolling
God forbid to hear the sadness of a time
that is getting darker and darker

The longest silences are blue
All the unheard sighs settle in stones
I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.

Write, for instance: “The night is full of stars,
And the stars, blue, shiver in the distance.”
Distant clouds hide their simplicity
in fields of hope

The night wind whirls in the sky and sings.
The night sky whirls in the wind
its surprise and weeps.

I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.
She was a wild woman; I, a violent man
She knew the stubbornness of tears
I knew the weight of sleep.

On nights like this, I held her in my arms.
I kissed her so many times under the infinite sky.
Our mouths postponed day fall
and the silence of time.

On nights like this, we undressed our shadows
I was hers and she was mine
Painting with nakedness the sky
We were each other passion for falling
Our arms kept on crushing
the same way the same day
this forgetful undying.

*That’s all. Far away someone sings. Far away.

Every year the desert
           (with d from devils)
advances fifteen kilometers
           (with k from karma)
dries up springs
            (with s from spirits)
dries up more and more words.
The dictionary is ever more famished -
essences on the leap
stop for a second over the abyss,
then whiten the cracked earth.
The poet watches
the pure skulls of the words;
the words, still living and hungry,
watch the poet.

By Grete Tartler, translated by Liviu Bleoca

time has a savage chemistry
it flows in silence in the depth of life
stolen or borrowed, hidden & fluent
and I am this space for time
to learn how to love itself &
the transparency of mystery

water shines like dreams that mystify their depth
in nights without moon by the sea the solitude of breath is even stronger
a savage sea feeds on the memory of light, but only the sand carries its age
its black heart rumbles a white rage
a watery path their dreams, they travelled by sea or the surface of time
they envisioned us perhaps
in the randomness of waves

the breaking edge of waves consumes me
wind, sand, water, light meet
in the love story of a time
surfing its waves

“Johnny's always running around
Trying to find certainty”*

you know this, don’t you?
I only knew you forward, unbearable
when I felt the foam of dawn
on your lips

and how wild fields bloom backwards
in the secrets of wind
in the culture of shame

that helpless zealous boy
with his eyes turned inwards
we are light and fiction
depending on the various proportions
in the geography of sight

we haven’t found out yet
the hidden geometry of thought
I’ve carried around this silently violent lover
an offering to the disappeared
to the void between your teeth

I never knew you

but your screaming point

no doors, complete surrender,
this vibrational mode
listening to the silence of your skin
I offer myself as a curb of melting points
you give yourself as screaming locks

don’t stop tearing me with gentleness
I’ll found myself again
into the liquid mercy in the beginning
the solid idea of us

This sacred sadness of the clouds
painted on the window pane.
This end of a century
splashed all over the walls!
The evening flowing down streets like heavy water...

...Who opened these windows in our foreheads,
who built these
secondary doors in our chests?
I walk inside me as if in a diseased season.
I hear mother’s voice from beyond the dark wall:
Why are you here,
why have you come back?
Go, out with you while there is still time.

I hear my elder brother’s voice as if muffled by water:
Get out of this light as soon as you can
and leave me alone
to breathe in my own shadow...

Whose faces are preserved here,
in this putrid evening light?
What season are a thousand
cut-off heads waiting for?
Whose arms will be sown in the field,
whose teeth will grow in the grass?

I walk across myself as if I were some strange season.
With Yorick’s skull in my hands, I wonder:
If I have reaped
where and what was it I reaped?
And if I harvest, when, whom am I harvesting?

**Nichita Danilov

I was so very aware
that the afternoon was dying in the domes,
and all around me sounds froze,
turned to winding pillars.

I was so very aware
that the undulant drift of scents
was collapsing into darkness,
and it seemed I had never tasted
the cold.

Suddenly
I awoke so far away
and strange,
wandering behind my face
as though I had hidden my feelings
in the senseless relief of the moon.

I was so very aware
that
I did not recognize you, and perhaps
you come, always,
every hour, every second,
moving through my vigil - then -
as through the spectre of a triumphal arch.

by Nichita Stanescu, translated by Thomas Carlson and Vasile Poenaru

“My wound existed before me;
I was born to embody it.”*
Joë Bousquet

No anaesthetic rhyming with aesthetic for the cracks of words now **** it! This pain keeps inventing skies to fall into, glass screams, corroded nails Crying comes from far away Words grow flesh Between fingers Herds are trampling on my heart inside plastic horizons This stupendous silence then Take my bones from yesterday Future is a catapult What if I am only a girl facing this      Breathe out

I am the possession/oppression The oppressor is me Pain is not a stylistic experiment Where can I hide my ears I crawled I bent Disfigured I had to pick up my eyes from fences, my lungs from the mirror I have a body full of used words, slapped doors, walls swollen by silence Hope to get used to be treated in the third person No poetics of space Pain is this quarry in me L’habitude of memory

I left my cigarettes today
the same way you leave the departed
I put them in their tombs of desire
their pain had infected me enough
like an invisible netwok of mold
decomposing dreams
my own

my secret garden  
already planted
my name chosen
my path clear
in their hidden mind
I had to love them all:
and I will, always
with quiet ardor,
adoration, gratitude

my secret garden a jungle
of emptiness
denied tenderness
never spoken words of love
terrors and longings,
unrequited pain

for so long I've been
my father's mother
in my hidden soul
what has survived
of me
was poetry

no language
complex
no methaphors
no more tears
for this raw truth
the only mother
for me
was poetry
when
there was beauty
in the sky
so crushing

When the hand which writes takes a rest
it seems to me demonically transparent;
beneath its skin, veins like a few plants
in a fishbowl — and the blood
flows within and floods
the silence; its murmur through time
the unlived life of the ancestors
rushing into the light of my eyes.

Dumitru Chioaru, from *It Might Take Me Years

silence falls over me from above
the sea songs in my hair wait for an allusion
my hips are shelter for the dance of blue shades
love is this imprecise semiosis even when
you go into specifics about its wavelengths
the splitting time of atoms,
its intensity, radiation and schedule

my steps leave no trace, my hands have no voice in your deja vu
a semiotic thing your imaginary body
there is no point in living only in one dimension
an unknowable god takes snapshots from our deeper minds while
love is just this superimposed image falling from above, turning into the sea

Then we met more often.
I stood at one side of the hour,
you at the other,
like two handles of an amphora.
Only the words flew between us,
back and forth.
You could almost see their swirling,
and suddenly,
I would lower a knee,
and touch my elbow to the ground
to look at the grass, bent
by the falling of some word,
as though by the paw of a lion in flight.
The words spun between us,
back and forth,
and the more I loved you, the more
they continued, this whirl almost seen,
the structure of matter, the beginnings of things.

Nichita Stanescu

When does the butterfly in flight read what’s written on its
wings? Pablo Neruda
Humans cannot bare too much reality. T.S. Elliot

what is
lost in a labyrinth of questions crushed by height
only the sky is the limit is the lie. lies have borders
"What is it you want?" asks Ivan Ilych
“What do I want? Not to suffer. To live”
in their words a map of darkness
the heart of stones stops. it's so
easy to split the light with digital words
the immunity of the herd shelter for violence

I recognize the feeling as I recognize the shadow of words
it makes poetry bleed out of dreams
we understand so well how Oedipus was manipulated by fate
thoughts without borders hide from themselves
when the world is unthinkable the mind is a no man's land
their smile  an eclipse of blood, in the middle of noise
life fights with its own scream

the certainty of tears pushed far away... behind the gaze till it spews hatred
a cry: the brides have forgotten to wear white,
digital happiness is unbearable
solitary selves search for communion but
the antihero doesn't ask who he is
this thought experiment terrorizes the inception of morning

a never ending cycle the desire
spectacular lives clash with normative statements
the empty father dillema in a fatherless society: some are afraid to be swallowed by the womb of the world
the resurection of the canon: the cross is hungry
let's discover these embalmed animals: our hearts

lay down the blade of thought
linden trees are blooming

a fearless incantation in my watery hands
that show you things you don't wanna know
about the fluidity of bones
I imagine with my fingers poems  you've never
asked for cause happiness is a bitter woman for you
take me back home from the land of noise
keep me in your armpit like the shadow of a smile

to A.C.
"Love is a wave
Inside our bodies"

we want to give it all away
give it to our shadow
heaviness, breath, despair
our shadows so thin so tormented by light
we are the contour of our tears
often times you happen to yourself
and some bliss in the depth of
fiercely found wisdom

there is so much space in our eyes
for the world to shiver anew to pass
through us like the shadow of light
you want to be held in the space of a heart
we need more space in the eye of the other for
our shadows to play unhindered in the quiet light

I share a narrow window with the seagulls
I don't know if for them air is a magic fluid
for me it is a canvas waiting to be filled
the coal of time is burning our breath
away

on this edge I hear different
things with different ears
the rain in close deserts
the emptiness of hours rolling into
something larger than themselves
your self, my self, their selves trapped nebulae
inside the knife of time carving wise bodies
when the flood of blood gets disconnected from the heart
bodies full of tears recycle the vaults of thought
I am no other than myself frozen in a primordial space,
a shelter for the pain of those I love

Little by little she became a word,
bundles of soul on the wind,
a dolphin in the clutches of my eyebrows,
a stone provoking rings in water,
a star inside my knee,
a sky inside my shoulder,
and I inside I.

by Nichita Stanescu, translated by Thomas Carlson and Vasile Poenaru

silence swings over waters as if...
it rehearses its unseen so...
to fill  in the depth of blanks
a stratified time inhabits the landscape
orphic dreams morph into your flesh
the wind collates its courage and rage
like someone who falls into a self
my words bite the shape of a scream
the hunger of love descends language into crumble
the beauty of lungs full of air is misleasing
when I am waiting for silence to miscarry its void

“If the perception of reality involves unpleasure, that perception – i.e., the truth – must be sacrificed". S. Freud

silence, this empty space
sight is stumbling on every object emptied of itself
I tend to forget all the nights  turning to dust
all the words turning to rust
we can hardly bear the intensity of paradoxes
I can see the world better through walls of tears

silence, this fullness of time when
the unreal seems so real, like the song of stones
I take back, I own the vision of my skin
grief is an explosive substance
the destruction of words follows
the destruction of mind really

who wants to see "the future of an illusion"?
we are so vulnerable so flawed when it comes
to creating reality, we want to forget all pain
we want to not know
the innocence of apples and oblivion we carry
in our dreams

silence
shimmering with the embers
of unspoken words

silence
molding the air like clay

silence that touches
with the clarity of its language,
with its glow
under the skin

your silence
stronger than the noisy city
that I am crossing today

Ioana Ieronim, **The Lens of a Flame

Silence as of one million closed doors
bestow powerful illusions upon loneliness,
it lights up the memory of its sons
even before they are born,
it carefully razes
the trees in which hamadryades slumber,
shut me up inside
the being that I am - so I do not know what I am -
and throw a light for all time
upon the moment of my death

Ioanid Romanescu, from **Magic

this simplicity
of being
not afraid
to be caught
with wind
in your pockets

I didn’t know you were here to stay... you’ve found a place to rest inside this chest. there is no one there, on the other side. why can I measure my life in pain-years?  I am going to listen to the weight of your step... we are so many... poor bodies with slaughtered desires. life lifts up gently like hypnotic steam from raw bodies while you growl inside my bones. you have thorns of truth and short sentences: “papa doesn’t love me”, “mama keeps cursing”, “I am useless”. you are the only thing alive since I insist to lay down in my mother womb over and over again. have me expelled, have me covered in a blanket of blood so that I do not see the future.  you keep giving birth to my selves.
stop looking at me with charcoal eyes, father
look, mother, you can have me silenced for the beauty of dawn

what is beauty: a naked word
sore chest with wonder
torment-like tension suddenly flooding
soothing radiation within
unborn words
silence

a world reinventing prayer: it is beauty
tearing me down

winter slowly digests me
it's hard to process
standing in the spaces
between the void of pain and
the void of ecstasy
(any void is just the unbearability
of fullness)
no violin can invent
some tears
my eyes not split
searching for
a tree-womb
to shelter my skin
and slow my cells
to the decency
of breathing,
to unearth
the old tale
gently
like an offering

suddenly I need to find you
and I do not know how to do that
where

the paths across land and water
teasing

hidden and mute
Time revolves
with its slow quickness
quick
slowness

grain of sand upon grain

until I happen
just happen
to remember
myself

and there
you are

Ioana Ieronim, **The Lens of a Flame

forests remain, farther and farther away from us.

only streets, houses
accompany me
like a fingernail on an exhausted hand
wherever i might stop, everywhere,
pain is my compass

always, along this way

forever unwalked
given back to me

the scent of roses in the garden
the waters flooded long ago, belated
tenderness, time
besieged by
time

everything goes by so easily.
life. so easily
was i
forgotten

Andrei Zanca  from *My Cup of Light

a wild god is sleeping in your bones
it is too early to tell the direction
of that thought, you know
it has a dark end
no need for an algorithm
for wonder

wild images colonize my brain
they throw me here and there
it's not too late under the roof of the world
not for a bleaching heart

something is growing like a wave
that forgot its end

“when you get up in the morning you must take your heart in your two hands. You must do this every morning.” Grace Paley

fall into me
on blackout days
for something beautiful
is here is everywhere
is nowhere
you knew it
Borges used it
beauty is a physical sensation
the axis mundi piercing
the palms of my hands

memory like a gipsy woman
who reads palms
beauty, yes, it draws the soul
ascetic
I figured it out in the smiling of your sleep
like babies smile to angels, they say
this game that keeps us alive is hers
golden beetles die for it
of for the love of dust

pastimes of gods its archives
everyday the light tastes differently
the body moves where the mind is
or the other way round
I'll read Cartarescu to you half naked
one page a day

beauty is the quest,
this spiral of wonder
filling up the rest &
my nails

there is something good
and some light
in this desire
enraging my cells
with divination chanting
sculpting my shape
in violent curves
I don't recongnize the hues
of mornings
because of frenzy:
the new definition of gravity
along the lines
mesmerizing visions of
softness and caring

love is a whirlwind
in any language
a clear water
so you can see
how translucent
nakedness can be

hers is
the bending of space
to smaller and smaller
atoms of delight,
fusion, diffusion, infusion

it holds you tight
from the very centre
(heart&lungs)
when it breaks you
and then these traces
the swarming of photons
in the fabric of skin
sweet radiance,
energetic warmness
an arch, a cohort of waves
crushing everything
like cherries' sense
reality sense
roads' sense

a scarring refusing
to scream/bleed
defiance of stillness
music of laughter
sun raising in your hands

there is something beautiful
for the poetess in me
it just describes herself well
for the never-day
it transmutes
anything:
beauty into horror
horror into despair
despair into words
even thought into
singing birds

sometimes
I understand only  the texture of your words,
the distance of your skin
you curse the silence waiting to be heard
you count the hours of toil like one counts lithium pills
you empty yourself of nothingness
desire links the margins of time
sometimes you make the proverbial schnitzel you remember
how good the *** was on the dining room table
I feel  the bruise of steps, the tiredness of patience
the sharp edges of thought, the easiness of laughter
I keep on dreaming myself going out of the night
somewhere inside the purity of limits like a blade
there is this feeling of you, round
like the time that exhausts its depth
the echo of tears gets lost in your hands,
sometimes

I couldn't dance with my eyes full of skin
Sometimes depth is synonym with pain
The ache of heart echoed the light of night
Luckily the moon was full of herself

Boats are roaming the shining, boats are sleeping in the port
Dreams are seafarers well contained in the electriciy of skin
Fishermen talk to me
I talk to you with invisible words
"Au revoir madame with beau chapeau"
Time is an artist in the randomness of breath

"C'est tres beau", says a little boy to me
We are smiling together at the sunset
It's the first time he sees it in the train, he confides in me
Innocent tears spin through my heart
Words cross boundaries when they feel what they see

somewhere in time everything already written
this marvel how everything meets anything
that belongs to a togetherness of darkness
I've been touched by this easiness of travelling
the path between garden and perfume
I've played the fool who believed images
so ready to commute in an endless still
pursuit of the chimera of truth

you know, there is this hidden dimension where
time and space haven't invented their names yet
cause they annihilate each other endlessly
there is this pain like a worm in an eagle's sight
so sensitive the spring of words
that time touches us with this wonder
a merciful road between chance and necessity

all the hope of a blind dawn in my writing hands
like a morning awaiting its silence
there is nowhere to hide from pain
in the end

when the world gets unbearable I retreat into the purity of words
do I own this heart or she owns me
an excedent of beats today as if I was traversed by an invisible sigh
my thoughts are a nomadic population searching for a soil without fear
death presents itself as an indifferent character, a secondary thing, an involuntary business, the latest fashion
who cares about the pain of the air
the skin of hours can hardly hold minds under siege
nights melt time like wax while I need to look at helplessness from a different angle
an unpredictible trajectory decides for the mornings we wake up into
there is space in the centre of words while the sky is eroded by death's toys
the eyes stand in the way some say we must die on earth to be born in the sky,  the sky disagrees, the dust clots
there are patches of blue sky somewhere, there is enough silence to hear the explosions in one's head or the augmented beauty of sleep
power miscalculates its claims in the impermanence of bones

here horizon feels like the palm of a god
the lake receives the fury of summer
un unutterable feeling pushes my hands into firestorms
light rests on everything heavy as the clouds
birds carry their chirp into the destiny of the air
the moon hides somewhere in the silence of the forest
my eyes are too small a nest for the  flow of wonder

"De mi-ai face tu inima punte, sa te intampin mereu."*

here, distracted by seagulls
I have dreams interrupted by gravity
you are painting the moon in my hair
I would like to open my eyes
to say something
but I am already taken to you in all languages
between the lines only empty spaces
I still haven't figured it out
why you split the page in two
don't want to hear the dying time
you are painting my red red heart
naked
I want to kiss your fingers,
your tired shoulders
in solid mornings
the way you stepped/screamed/exploded inside
my skin your umbrella against the void
they cannot convince me of anything
the night cannot erase
the freedom of light
in Turner's eye

somewhere beyond the hip of night
I'm waiting for something by the sea
but what it is
it's a mystery carried by seagulls
so far away
that far away
from me

i follow pain everywhere she wants to take me
she reveals a cosmos in a tear,
the layers of time kept together by the vitality of light.
silences rest in between our dreams
the clouds are enough for the wind
branches enough for the birds
love is holding its antonyms with gentleness
i follow pain into the camera obscura of hope
wars are trapped in the flash of words without flesh.
the lament in the loops of time, so much

my eyes a blue absence memories disguised in tears
I cannot be other but a song, as simple as that
I am you only in the morning, then
I commute the night to the tempo of your steps
you should come with me to the edge of noise
of haze of pearls where all begins with a duchenne smile
I am surrounded by blind walls free only in my sleep
when I fall far away from me in another you
what I say have already been said many times
by candlelight in truth and bone marrow
the fullness of my love too deep for sorrow

sleepless forests
in my dreams
embracing the shape of you
sung by the pine trees

I wait each night for a self.
I say the mist, I say the strange
tumble of leaves, I say a motor
in the distance, but I mean
a self and a self and a self.
A small cold wind
coils and uncoils in the corner
of every room. A vagrant.
In the dream
I gather my life in bundles
and stand at the edge of a field
of snow. It is a field I know
but have never seen. It is
nowhere and always new:
What about the lives
I might have lived?
And who? And who
will be accountable
for this regret I see
no way to avoid? A core,
or a husk, I need to learn
not how to speak, but from where.
Do you understand? I say
name, but I mean a counduit
from me to me, I mean a net,
I mean an awning of stars.

by Charif Shanahan

who knows if we trully own our words
or they own us
too many sunsets and dawns are happening in the same time
and the departed are tormenting us with the song of their flesh
I found a rhyme in you
absence rhymes with presence
somewhere in the hands of time

You were so absent while washing
your face in the morning, you never saw
how the linden in the courtyard reached a limb
through the bathroom window and shook
sticky seeds into your hair. Your hair grayed
in this working class neighbourhood you’d heard
already as a child smelled like a ruined life.
The turrets of the little Russian church
once looked so fragile to you – you wanted
to feed them carrots from your hand
and croutons. Your heart was alive.
Your heart was like an iodine rain
over a crowd of crushed heads.

By Dan Sociu, from Sentimental and Naïve Poetry, translated
by Oana Sanziana Marian

things went accordingly
explosive by the book
consequently I found
pineful silhouettes
fossils of empty hands
floating poems
the boundaries of words
silk illusions or outrageous life
frozen layers of pain
pigments of pride
here is the splitting point
hey, don’t leave with me-crumbs
on your shoulders
I could make you the watchman of dreams
were they to loosen their grip

I am the daughter
of those serious people
without tears
the first flash of light-
the primordial invasion
violence against unformed space
a trapping container
I had to find escaping routes
from my mother’s womb
it chewed me out
it left me with no skin
so naked,  insane

I couldn’t try my birth before
only measure my pace
put it into question marks
spin around in memory-years
till it hit me that
I was so old
when I was born
not to hold on to
the vortex of wonder
the essence of reverie
the crest & zest of words
till I can make it
to the other side
of gravity

I'll wear the seduced horizons
and you'll drug me with silence
or rhyme bossa nova in my blood

air, tears, poetry, color
just names for the hunger of that space
in between my train of thoughts
when it happens -
the scent of you in the morning
and dried flowers in your eyes
it's just...
the hand forgets the handle
and the feet unlock the weight

soon baby, soon
there will be something singing
when skies are flowing
and wonders can/should/might
give me some
of your bright

the soul of joy grows in circles
it glitters in children's cheeks
singing together washes away
the momentum of nonsense
I contemplate the unknown,
the right proportion of light of darkness
their breath kept in balance,
the golden harvest of hearts,
of hours
the fir tree gives away
some scent, some wonder

Merry Christmas