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LINE UP AT THE GATE
IMAGINARY
GEOGRAPHIES
DISCONSOLATE
CONQUESTS
THE FARCE
OF THINGS
PASSAGE
INTO ANOTHER WOMAN
LINE UP
AT THE GATE
Each morning lining up at the gate
My temples explode from the tension
I try to imagine what it’s like to die
In the uproar of the toy pistol
Which can’t kill anyone
But fills everyone with terror.
I crouch at the ready.
The women stare at me curious to find out
Where I aim to go each time
With my syllables awkwardly paired
One with life, one with death
With that light about the eyes
Which, it is reported, is painless,
A kind of happiness invades you
To the last cell, the last word
Frozen on your lips.
Each morning
Lining up at the gate,
The uproar of the toy pistol
Which can’t kill anyone
But fills everyone with terror
With repetition’s perfection:
The race, the line up at the gate, the race
All the way to insanity
IMAGINARY
GEOGRAPHIES
If it hadn’t been for that morning
In autumn
The incandescent breath
Of the decapitated city
The silence fallen
Like a burgundy curtain
We would have gone on betting
On the long shot
In imagined clashes
In imaginary geographies
Staring at our shadows
Stretching to the absurd
In deceitful mirrors
The strong are alone
The strong are forlorn
And so vulnerable
In the naïveté to push their dreams
Beyond where
Even they could still follow them
With their sight.
From above everything appears the same:
The dead with the dead
The living with their vanity.
DISCONSOLATE CONQUESTS
Here we are
Quarantined in a foreign speech.
I step absent-mindedly over the tree tops
Squashing here and there
A flag ostentatiously hoisted
In honor of those who happened to forget
That we are already at the highest peak
Of disconsolate conquests.
You linger in the penumbra of a cafe
Saturated by poets
By the poets' lovers with languorous lashes
And biographies reshuffled on the run.
Our passage here
Is no more than a rehearsal
For that Great Journey
Where the two of us will fly on our backs
With pupils dilated
By what we had to learn too late
And fingers locked together
As if our lives were
Elsewhere
And our passage through here
Merely to scatter the ashes.
THE FARCE OF THINGS
After a while
Things no longer recognize their master.
There is a revolt of objects
Too long kept under control
A conspiracy with time,
Creator of farces,
Who leaves us with the illusion
That something belongs to us definitively
With the exception of doubt.
Objects will survive us
With the haughtiness of their own destiny
Liberated from the soul
We invested them with,
Always ready to be faithful
To another master
Just as the morning after dying
The light will fall the same way
On the bed sheets with poppy flowers
Gift from your aunt
We'll need to throttle our fright
Which the new tenant
Will wrap his hunting rifle in.
PASSAGE INTO ANOTHER WOMAN
Here I am, finally vulnerable
Seated in the great silence
Like gold dust
Over the glow of this city
Once powerful and inviolate.
Ultimately indifference kills
Stones and souls
With losses, delays, deceptive identities.
I would have liked to write poems
On leaves and walls
For you and for never
Defiant and idle
Utterly absent from this world
And from those to come
To contort my stomach with fear.
The powder of my bones
Will whistle in the Destroyer's ears
My passage into another woman
Finally vulnerable,
Defiant to His words
And frozen by your tear
Further and further
And finally concealed.
Poems by Carmen Firan
Translated from
Romanian by Julian Semilian
Born in Romania, Carmen Firan is a poet, a fiction witer, and a
journalist. In
her native country she has published eleven books of poetry.
She is the author of many articles on literature, politics,
women studies, emerging democracies and civil society, essays,
and criticism, short-stories and, plays. Her writings appear
in translation in several literary magazines and in various
anthologies in France, Israel, Sweden, Germany, Ireland,
Canada, U K, and the USA.
Her recent books and publications in the United
States of America include: The
Farce, Spuyten Duyvil, 2002,
In The Most Beautiful Life (with photographs by
Virginia Joffe), Umbrage Editions, New York, 2002, Afternoon
With An Angel, Pamphlet Series of Poetry
New York, 2000,
The First Moment After Death, Writers Club Press, 2000,
Accomplished Error, Spuyten Duyvil, 1999; she also
published many works of poetry and fiction in literary
magazines, such as:” Exquisite Corps” : A Journal of Life
and Letters, 2002, "Brooklyn Rail", 2002
"Talisman", Magazine for Poetry and Poetics, New
York.,2001,"Hubbub", Magazine of Poetry, volume
sixteen, 1999-2000, "Transcendental Friends", A
Literature and Translations Magazine, November 1999,
“Arshile”, A Magazine of the Arts, 10, Los Angels, 1998,
"East - European Monographs", Bolder University,
1999, "Library of Congress Pamphlet Series", 1999,
"An Anthology of Romanian Women Poets ", East
European Monographs, Columbia University Press, New York,
1994.
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