|
Ion Mircea
Incomparable, this cedar oil. One drop enlarges an image 400 times. As if you banished the blue of sky and suddenly you saw, deathly still in all their splendor, the pieces of the microscope. Colonies of mice invading the cellars, the robots’ biographies, underground churches, crows and blue flies devouring dirigibles, transparent magnets attracting an old clearing to the circumference of the sphere where it is kept, on a winter night, among the royal cedars, the formula of water, The Wild Strawberries or Africa weeping like a glass of tar drifting among icebergs. In a thousand ways one could read from the sky that steaming swatch of skin. Not a breathing thing anywhere nearby: a village annihilated by the visitation of a tiger.
translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Liliana Ursu
Too much in the light for the first part of my life, my body has become a film more and more faded, invisible, and the fog is nibbling away at its edges. In the Goldsmiths’ Market there is fog. I climb the Fingerling Steps shrouded in fog, and up there, on the top of the Fingerling Steps, still in fog, a Wallachian dance from the sixteenth century with little bells chiming in the fog.
I continue in front of a watch-repair shop, it is getting dark early again and there is fog, the light inside turns the window into the window of a monstrous clock, made of thread, a face beyond it stares at the passers-by between the hands of the clock, through the fog.
Now all this has just fallen away and the night is more and more softly eddying about me, I squeeze together all these passages incurved toward the center and in such focus, as if from another life, this very landscape newly varnished with fog, as if through an ancient magnifying lens comes back to life.
translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Liliana Ursu
|