Wheel With a Single Spoke (2 page)

Lesson on a Cube

Hourglass

Jacob and the Angel

Lesson on a Circle

K
NOTS AND
S
IGNS
(
Noduri şi semne, 1982
)

Through an Orange Tunnel

Knot 17

Sign 14

Knot 23

Sign 18

Sign 19

Knot 31

Knot 33. In the Quiet of Evening

Translator's Afterword

W
HEEL WITH A

S
INGLE
S
POKE

and other poems

The dance moved in circles, with airplanes:

some golden,

some silver.

They went like this: a half circle

on the left side, going up

then down, over the roofs

. . . then up, on the right

golden, silver.

How they spun as they fell

golden, silver . . .

After that a neighbor's house was gone

and the house on the corner

and the house next door . . .

And I was amazed

and shook my head:

look, there's no house! . . .

look, there's no house! . . .

look, there's no house! . . .

You dropped your chalk

and the splintered door beat against the wall

the sky appeared, partly hidden

by the spiders

that fed on murdered children.

Someone had taken away
the walls

and fruit tree

and stairs.

You hunted after spring
impatiently, like you were expecting
a lunar eclipse.

Toward dawn, they even took away

the fence

you had signed with a scratch,

so the storks would not lose their way

when they came

this spring.

From the point of view of trees,
the sun is a band of heat,
people – a terrible emotion . . .
They are the wandering fruits
of an even greater tree.

From the point of view of stones,
the sun is a falling stone,
people are a tender pressure . . .
They are motion added to motion
and light you can see, from the sun.

From the point of view of air,

the sun is air full of birds,

wing beating on wing.

People are birds never before seen,

with wings ingrown

that beat, hover, glide,

within an air more pure: thought.

And a wind wrapped around my chest
as it passed, and transparent arms,
tossed by body into the clouds,
where lightning licked my breast.

Oh, and thus, in one toss or another,

were my soles sliced by a peak, whose white

turned ruby red with my blood,

later,

when my body extended its height.

A floating soul and I crossed paths.

It told me, in despair:

I have not descended from these high currents

since Hiroshima's mushroom launched me into the air.

O soul, I shouted,

I am not dead!

Calm yourself with the moon.
The scaffolding sprayed into translucence
and I danced across, surrounded by light,
with the tip of my vision in the future.

The lion cub, love

leapt toward my face.

Her hunt had begun, muscles tense,

long before.

Her white fangs plunged into my face,

the lion cub bit me, today, in the face.

And at that moment, nature
encircled me, further
away it felt, then closer
like a narrowing of waters.
And my gaze jetted upward,
a rainbow in two parts,
and I found my sense of hearing
near the song of the skylark.

I moved my hand to my brow,

temple and chin,

but my hand no longer knew them.

And slipping into the unknown

passing over a desert, dazzling

in measured steps

moved a copper lioness

treacherous,

a little further away,

and a little further . . .

I look back over my life's ages,

over the line of bodies I set up

straight

like a pillar to support

the sky, with the sun in the center.

There's a child's body whose arms hold

an adolescent's body.

There's an adolescent whose shoulders lift

a man's body.

There's a man's body on whose forehead are

the wrinkled feet of an old man.

There's an old man with whiskers yellowed

from tobacco,

who kisses the mouth

of phantom clouds,

the blue sky, the black universe.

This life of mine, like a pillar,
I offer to hold your heavens
over weddings and births,

and I call on lovers to carve

their initials into me,

enclosed in the outline of a great heart,

pierced by an arrow

of light.

In the end, we saw each other more and more often.

I was on one side of the hour,

you, the other,

like the handles of an urn.

Only words flew between us,

before and after.

Their vortex was almost visible,

and then,

I dropped to one knee,

stuck my elbow in the earth,

only to observe how blades of grass

bent under falling words,

as though beneath the paw of a sprinting lion.

The words spun and spun between us,

before and after,

and the more I loved you, the more

they repeated, in an almost visible vortex,

da capo, the structure of matter.

I remember, still amazed

by that time when my mind

was enveloped in a haze,

the jumble

of memories and desires and loves,

and I would wait to fall asleep, to plunge into a sleep,

like a pearl diver, whose ocean

pulls streams of blood from his nostrils.

I was connected to objects

by invisible vines,

I would hang from them and swing,

I threw myself from hour to hour,

the way, once upon a time,

a shouting Tarzan threw himself,

from one jungle tree to another

his feet fluttering through the air,

never touching

the silent, fecund earth.

An evening one Thursday, an evening heart-thick,
when our destinies grew
like grass in spring,

and I loved you

so much I forgot you

and believed you were part of me.

And only then was I surprised
when I smiled sometimes, and you
didn't

when I stole leaves from the trees

and you

stayed beneath them, a little longer.

Only then did it seem

you were someone other,

but only as

the evening sun can be another –

the moon . . .

Why should I love you, woman dreaming,
wrapped around me like smoke, like a grapevine
around my chest, brow,
ever lithe, ever writhing?

Why should I love you, woman delicate
as a blade of grass that bisects the estival
moon, knocking it into the waters,
separated from itself
like two lovers after an embrace? . . .

Why should I love you, melancholic eye,
pale sun that rises over my shoulder
and drags along a sky, in gentle scents
thin clouds, and no shade?

Why should I love you, unforgotten hour,

when in place of tones

horses race around my heart,

a herd of foals with rebellious manes?

Why should I love you so much, love,

a sky colored by seasons knocked

(always another, always close)

like a falling leaf. Like a breath wind turns to frost.

Tell me, if I ever caught you
and kissed the arch of your foot,
wouldn't you limp a little after that
for fear of crushing my kiss? . . .

I watched so carefully
that noon sputtered over the cupolas
and sounds around me turned to ice,
twisted like columns.

I watched so carefully

that scents undulating in the air

plunged into a darkness

as though I had never before felt

cold.

Suddenly

I found myself so far away

and foreign,

lost behind my own face,

as if I had wrapped my senses

in the senseless mountains of the moon.

I watched so carefully

that

I did not recognize you, and you may

be ever-arriving,

every hour, every second,

and through my erstwhile vigil, you march

as if through a phantom Triumphal Arch.

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.

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.