[from the volume Flowered String, Max Blecher Publishing House, 2012]
translation from Romanian by Nigel Walker & Zenovia Popa [MTTLC student]
click pentru versiunea română
What is one of your dead people telling you
the dearest, the most beloved among the dead,
when your heart allows you to dream him:
’Do not get scared, it is extremely simple,
everything you were told during seven years
of good family upbringing is true:
there are people and people are good.
souls are alive and kicking,
sheltered in layers of meat
like the recidivists in bunks,
tender and embracive homicides.
And you shall be answered
unequivocally, just when you say “angel
my little angel who was given to me” the air
shall be pieced, pulled
from things like a shiny packaging
from a gift promised long ago,
and inside the air shall jump,
with the professional movements of a stripper
leaping from the cake, the little angel.
As long as you look flabbergasted at him, he’ll go
ups-a-daisy, afterwards it comes down
like a hang-glider towards you. But
almost always, as if unwillingly,
the little angel lands in a legion of pigs
and damned he seems of mercury,
this is how he enters and spreads through porky bodies.
You do not get to wonder much, an unseen
hand slaps raffishly two pokes
behind the ear, he lies you on your back,
with an unseen scalpel he opens
the chest cage, than puts
his unseen fingers full of blood
between the unseen lips full of blood
and whistles cutely like a swineherd.
And the pigs approach you somewhat tenderly
align their muzzle
on the sides of the small trough of ribs
and, happy to see fresh pig swill,
he munches the blood, gobbles up the heart.
Only then, lying on his back,
you see on the sky, flocked like pigs,
panoramic herds of little angels with red-red muzzles,
only incisors, canines and molars, laughing at you.
As I was saying, do not be afraid: this is how the answer
begins, and we all deserve it.
It is extremely simple, the little angel laughing from behind the lards
will explain everything in time.’
What is one of your dead people telling you
the dearest, the most beloved among dead,
when your heart allows you to dream him:
’Dear, on that day when November sun
was warmish like a fresh corpse
and I was dying in your arms
I could not imagine that here,
where everything is dreadfully good,
there is an air strong as vodka, you feel your knees give away.
and it scratches your stomach, that I am waiting for you
more ragged, more groggy,
more famished day by day.
Do not hurry, mind your own living,
I am on my feet here
until you come –
like pottage after sweet exhilaration,
like yoghurt over steatosis liver,
like glucose in macerated veins.
Even if the air here makes me hobnail,
do not hurry, there is no other place to die but here.
I think. So live your happiness,
I shall make eyes at you when you come,
you will not be next a drop in the ocean, it is right,
but you’ll hold me, like then, in the arms
under the warm sun from here,
and perhaps this time I shall recover,
your fresh dead man embrace
will penetrate like an injection with adrenalin
in the heart. Therefore be alive, be happy of your live life,
however ridiculous it may be.”
Here you wake up with your cheeks burning and your brains
steaming in the pannikin skull like a hot potato,
boiled for a long time for a poor meal.
[Here, where we all live the woeful hope of life, in fact there is nobody. The most alive do not know anything about life. The most beautiful did not see the beauty. The most unhappy do not know what misery is. The heart beats with the fanaticism of the little sparrow that goes on flying for minutes after her wings became enflamed all of a sudden.]
[What is really unbearable: not so much the dream as the awakening. And not so much the fear during minutes afterwards, as when you breath in dyspneally in the dark, trying not to wake them up; the fears goes away. The hard part comes in the morning, when small adorable routines refuse to be routines – each little thing, as small as possible, has barbaric reverberations. When you open up a bib, for example, you realize this is how you opened a garrote. Absolutely every gesture is hypersemantic, as if your eyelids were cut and you see, exceedingly clear, an adequate excess of senses. With every dream, another layer from the world of light & paranoia is excavated. After each dream, the universe is horribly sentimentalized.]
What is one of your dead people telling you
the dearest, the most beloved among dead,
when your heart allows you to dream him:
’Dear, each morning,
from 4-5 o’clock, in my chest
an old man with broken eyes
reads poems about us in Braille
with trembling fingers
like your voice then.
And as he reads, the earth enlightens
Like the sky in the east,
When the day is breaking
I see you bent over the coffin,
holding my head in your palms and yelling,
your face enlightened with joy, ’live, live!’,
I like so much watching him,
You are looking at me with eyes full of hope
Of an animal grown for sacrifice.
Then God makes his visit among coffins
as the doctor visits the wards.
And, while you are doing artificial breath,
waiting for the paramedics, He passes among the graves
full of hope, accompanied by archangels & seraphim
like a herd of residents & assistants.
And we, the dead, we bewail from the coffins
like a herd of ill people from the sickbed,
begging for a diagnosis as resonant as possible.
Even if the residents & assistants
rail against us and hurl, He is good
and patient and does not get upset.
He has, like any doctor, an oath to be respected.
And, as he bends over each one of us,
His breath passes through decayed brains
like spirit for bread, he covers the bones in air meat
and the dead is a mole fluttering its wings woozily
And when the paramedics tell you: ’he is dead’,
here a shining sun just arises
like the first fifty of vodka
after a night of dreadful happiness.
He goes further, with the herd gathered
Like a bright overall around his body,
bending over each coffin
as you bend over to through a mouldball.
When he finishes the visit it is almost evening,
the sick are silent as they might be after unexpected diagnoses
and silence covers my room then,
after the paramedics had gone out and you were watching over
near my poor body. Then it is dreaming time’.
You don’t even know how long you have been awake. Lurking
to find out where it floats around the room,
you suspect he sees how it arises
in the eyes of the sacrificial animal
a black sun like the first fifty of vodka
after a night of dreadful happiness.
[You don’t understand how these dreams can make you equally happy and unhappy. But happiness is for the unhappy. The happiness of happy people is a misery. So you think, and you keep feeling your happy heart, with the delicacy of a young elephant crushing calmly the skull with the trunk.]
What is one of your dead people telling you
the dearest, the most beloved among dead,
when your heart allows you to dream him:
’Dear, here it has already started.
It cannot last longer
until it starts there too.
The earth dice jump day and night
like champagne corks
on the dead they cover.
Those covered by a grass too dry
are emblazing and enlighting like indicators.
Mine at least this is how it lightened.
We, suicides, woke up each one of us
as we knocked us off.
One with the knife in the heart,
another with the bullet in his brains,
another with opened veins.
But they are working hard on the image.
I have received the same worn out undershirt
I was wearing when I hanged myself
and I am waiting for you garrote and all,
but raffia was told to blossom,
and God paints butterflies
on each petal from the flowers garrote,
careful as if he were
my best friend
shaving for the wedding.’
Here you wake up. Cami is sleeping peacefully,
Tweety’s pyjamas is raising and coming down slowly,
from the crib one can hear the snot little engine
from Sebastian’s little nose.
As usual, after the disaster
the world is perfect.
What is one of your dead people telling you
the dearest, the most beloved among dead,
when your heart allows you to dream him:
’Dear, there is not a day it does not appear
one you can see immediately
because he is a little dazed, he got here
like a refugee hacked by dogs
& ragged by rangers’ boots
& lighted. A guy who hurled to death
like a famished dog attacks
the ball in flayer’s hand.
Desolated and yet full of hope,
a child waiting every day
to see love in his abuser’s eyes.
I understand him like a brother.
It was love I was expecting too, because
the raffia string tightened full of love
around my neck until it re-absorbed under the skin,
full of love sniffed the mouldballs
over me, full of love the coffin fly
did her business. But I received only
calm & placation, cast over bones & carpentry
like the nard perfume from the alabaster vessel
over the sad tresses. And only then could I understand
love is a raffia string, love
is the ball in the flayer’s hand,
love is the bruises under child’s
full of hope eyes. And perhaps
love is only the terror I am looking at
every refugee hacked by wounds & hopes,
praying It was not you. Day by day, like the child
looking in his butcher’s eye, I am looking in the eyes of the one coming in
and pray not to be you. Stay where there is love,
dear, let the fear anoint my body
for another sepulcher with its nard perfume,
you mind your Paradise CamiSebastian & be love.”
You creep in, groping, outside the room,
the parquet is squeaking under your bare feet, you turn on
the computer, you have to get quickly to the Undenied.
And the moon arising slowly in the corner of the velux window,
and the cooler buzzing slowly, and the refugee heart
deep throat somewhere, and the roars restrained –
all shall repeat again and again, because you know
he is right, and because you know you can never
be love. Just no.
When your heart will be almost love, somebody
will hurl at it like the ball in the flayer’s hand.
You understand him like a brother.
2 thoughts on “Poems by Radu Vancu”