O. Nimigean

The First. The Second

the first

isn’t given to you by god you seek it

yourself

step by step making your own way beyond

the sign of flesh of blood and of verb—I am a seeker

myself—they started

to call me the stranger to call me

the enemy but I can hardly feel

the breeze of their words brush the nape of my neck

from far beyond the woods the mountains the whetstone the lakes

—their curse nearly a caress

farther and farther away on a narrowing path

a path of air gradually forgetting

colors because there’s only light only

darkness here—just my cherry-red blood

frightened I stare at it through transparent hands

it seems to be something else—and then

involuntarily I catch myself crying

farther and farther away on a narrowing path

but never far enough

the first isn’t given to you by god you seek it

yourself and if you find it

it cannot be written       the second

is inevitably a stutter

                                                                        translated by

                                                                        Adam J. Sorkin and Radu Andriescu

Man with a Monocle

each word we speak turns contrary —in this way melancholy

takes root—the whole of the world abandoned outside—       every day I feel

I’ve become the victim of syntax—in what language can I

discover the principle of universal connection?       paupers these metaphors

mere paupers—their glass towers scrape against the inside of my skull—

metaphors that float animated by an imaginary life in space that

my neurons secrete that my eyelashes populate as usual

with strange creatures (cambrian ancestors teeming

among the spongy stalks of vauxia blind creatures with little legs

dreadful and ridiculous with gelatinous cilia naroia

wiwaxia opabinia pathetic insectacules hallucigenia

and odontogriphus—I’ve got the cynicism to imagine them still warm

with the breath of god—contemporary too with aluminum

irises and electronic brains and likewise descendants

plunging into liquid screens and yes the distant race

of wavicle-people       ephemeral space

clumping into the alluvia of dead cells)

forever a stranger, I dream:  of a syntax dissociated from numbers

a language dissolving itself relation by relation affix by affix letter

by letter like a building emitting ultrasound

(until numbers transform into music until music

transforms into light until light turns absolutely translucent:

a transparent lens through which I the stranger—

puffed up with manifest hauteur

squinching shut one of my eyes—

will look into the void)

                                                                        translated by

                                                                        Adam J. Sorkin and Roxana Muscă

But They Didn’t Beat You

(but they didn’t beat you in cells they didn’t smash

your teeth they didn’t make you eat your feces they didn’t rape

your mother they didn’t starve you worse than the

others       and in the evening under the grape arbor you breathed the perfumed air a sonatina of herbs of leaves of fruit and you whispered poems with few consonants almost ethereal and you watched with dreamy eyes the lighting of street lamps and the constellations

thinking about the sex of a faraway lover

as if it were a luminous stained-glass window

why, then?)       why, then?

                                                                                                translated by

                                                                        Adam J. Sorkin and Radu Andriescu

Some Apothegms Which—Most Likely—We’ll Meditate on Later

in the third person they will speak of the final circle

where words are sounded by nobody’s mouth

(I turns into he—

the animal replete with images   a skull inside which

clouds chase after one another—

he passes his body time

a small pyre of flesh and blood

bones and marrow

a fierce creature genetically programmed

mimetically determined

—he makes love makes a house makes history makes culture

he makes his kids’ beds

he goes to church kneels sings believes

he stands by the wall pounds his head against the wall)

he who postulates will be lost

he who promulgates axioms will be lost

he who affirms will be lost

he who negates will be lost

he who takes it for granted will be lost

he who speaks the language of the tribe will be lost

he who listens to the language of the tribe will be lost

he who takes up the sword will die by the sword

he who takes up the sword of the spirit will die by the sword of the spirit

he who believes in God will be lost

he who doesn’t believe in God will be lost

he who doesn’t get lost will never awaken

he who doesn’t awaken will live

(kiss your brother let him lean on your shoulder weep for him)

he who wakes up will be blind

translated by

                                                                        Adam J. Sorkin and Roxana Muscă