During the Occupation, Cioran riding a bicycle

through the Place de la Concorde – picking up his way along cars,

disabled veterans, loudspeakers pouring forth Edith Piaf

and vending stations with blue-white-pink icecream,

subtle statements of the Resistence.

In coffee houses customers kept a provocative silence,

a philosophical silence – drawers were running empty,

manuscripts were parachuted

onto the pastures of Switzerland,

but nobody left

the blacked-out city of the absurd,

of champagne and cognac,

and of silken stockings.

In the caves of the Gestapo

they resorted to the most vicious kinds of torture:

sleep deprivation or pressing people to write out

everything they knew about everything else

exhaustively – nobody suspected then,

that not far away,

in a penthouse of the Latin Quarter

such had already become a modus vivendi.

THE  SAME  POEM

                                        to Mircea Ivanescu

I am not allowed to write, not even to speak,

about Mopete, Denisa, Silver Knife Street,

since he had managed so much better – while

some described the window sill with his cats stepping over

that woman novelist's thrillers:

I missed having a room of my own like his and the evenings of those

years one had to sneak through bending over the book one was reading

yet sometimes our hands touched while searching the stalls

or the shelves in used books stores – one's handbags

consigned at the entrance with their contents easily guessed,

like someone wrapped in too tight fitting a coat,

they all of a sudden rustled and then,

all customers turned reproachfully their head in their direction –

oh those polymers troubling the comfort of our lives,

you will never ever decay.

Or about that alley in the public gardens which had known better days,

with gibbous benches on which you spread a newspaper

and so you could imagine a carriage and pair – you know, one of those

out of which there used to step down a tall yet frail

lady – whose fingers one would delicately grasp,

and who knew how to follow the story or the mentioned

dream – the steaming glases, whose blur

got rid of the grafitti cut into the birch trees' bark,

the silvery outline of the statue – and after a time

you returned to your books and again

close to your typewriter something smiling at you, reassuringly,

gently and discretely, something about which

people used to talk sometimes,

to write and in which you could even put your trust.

EX  ORIENTE  LUX

                                 to Mihai Posada

Some time will go by until  

after a whole year of silences under the Big Dipper,

of questions asleep in space,

our eyes glint under the same stars,

when, dizzy with the same old music,

I'm hanging on your lips.

Meanwhile we're exchanging air in envelopes

trying to balance the atmosphere

of a continent shivering with cold –

war is the bitter whiff of a wet ember,

it is a face with dried-up tears,

it is a hand buried in one's bosom

and at each cross in the road there is a customs house

with its wall colapsed over the night

and from the daily fear risen again,

while the Estonians go out for a walk

through the London of the jackets

with their arm raised as saluting with a salvo,

and oldfashioned accent of small talk –

by the roaring fireside

at each table three languages are spoken

with the grandparents severely looking from their portraits.

SO  WHAT?

If instead of passion or some creed

our sentence never goes beyond one line,

like the proverb written on a grain of rice

which through germination dies a slow death;

if neither stingy, nor successful,

one day an archive will swallow us whole,

seedy and sad we'll delude ourselves

of never seeing venice gone astray;

if we are deemed as ultra, pre or post

if our pen's ink stained our coat's lining

and we still hold our aims in high regard

bragging the danube's wider than the styx;

if from the dacian, scythian or illyrian

our tongue's roots are tangled with despair

if all the tristia have been written down,

we've got no lyre, nor statue by seashore;

if no one ever reads us any longer

we still do spend on books our bottom dollar,

and if we fail to find the fitting rhyme –

So what? we've got blank verse to trifle with !

A  DAY’S  WORTH  OF  LANDSCAPE  PAINTING

First I drove the black nails in with a heavy heart

for their rusty taste spelled failure:

leaning against the spruce frame

I stretched, using a pair of tongs, the coarse flaxen canvas,

but finer than any shirt

worn by a crusader king kneeling at dawn.

Then I rubbed in the white of the chalk mountain

high, snow-clad, virtually unknown,

using my finger tips, as Cennini requires.

Waiting for it to dry out, I was looking for the paints,

the jar holding the brushes was among the flowerpots

and it was still in the morning.

Forgetting the dreamt about visage, unintentionally,

I drew the same tree with the vertical eyes

of some minstrel hidden behind the shell of his lute,

taking care to put somewhere, close to

the deepest shades, the purest

light, as they used to lecture us.

Then, giving up, I cover them with eyelids

of ocher, for autumn is driving against window panes

leaves, earthen hues – blue

is a rarity as it was in Dürer’s time,

leaden whites will always poison the clouds.

And the people are far away on the hill

frightening the crickets out of the haystacks,

lost between the poppies of sleep

and the steam from the slowly-turned hay

by the horns os the snails – it is high noon.

I paint a bird diving down, unmindful even of its nest

in a nook rendered green by some indiscrete petals,

a pied stone and warm like an egg

a child is stooping down to,

a brook covered by rainbow scales

next to a house with its door flung open.

It is evening, having lost its bearings

amongst the lengthening shadows,

a butterfly is ineffectually flapping its wings,

which I touch with the last remnant of azure,

then, down below, in the right corner, the signature goes.

*   *   *

Drive away the butterflies of anxiety – always

few have jealously watched over the sleep

of the many,

absorbing attentively inside their lungs

the silence preceding words,

the loneliness of the interminable mornings

as stealthily guided through broken flutes

warming melancholy at one’s breast –

an abandoned kitten still blind,

sometimes an ancient piece of shrapnel

rusting on inside one’s heart muscle,

with one’s soul covered all over by corns

with one’s eyelids blinking after light

yet with no dream of healing

counting on the fingers of darkness,

wakeful, ever wakeful …

My Friend

This poet who is well

past sixty,

who survived a war,

and the century’s comet,

and the millennium’s apocalypse,

even the heart attack of the erotomaniacs,

the sudden death during sleep,

the unavoidable choking, almost predestined,

with doctored, highly volatile spirits,

of the infallible poison of loneliness,

or the subtler one of tobacco,

the violent one of earthquakes,

flooding, revolutions, fires,

robbers, stray dogs, tramps,

cancer, conscience trappers,

the hatred of those who do not read,

the stifling love of disciples

of autograph hunters

this poet worn out in little personal skirmishes,

tossed from one anthology to the other,

adulated, plagiarized, imitated,

crowned as laureate, prize winner, quoted, invited,

poor like bookworm,

this restlessly anxious poet,

too exhausted for any more poetry writing,

ever closer to eternity...

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