George Vulturescu
Translated from Romanian by Adam J. Sorkin and Olimpia Iacob
[Untitled]
Lying on the grass, in night’s slag,
I heard a great roar, as from an animal
bellowing beneath the clay. A gagging stench
of mud flooded the night. The North erupted
as belches, in oxides of weeds and grass.
I felt my body could disappear,
seep into the deep green
dissolve as in amniotic fluid. Upon my body
I felt the fluidity of a sidelong gaze as if
an artist’s brush kept trying to daub
scales or wings. I felt a mineral-oil gaze
stroke and coat my body.
With a shudder I howled at the sky: Is it for you
that I repose here on the grass, Lord Painter?
Between the Lines, The North Rests on Letters
Lost among the arcades of the old city
after the voice of Blake: “Prisons are built
with stones of Law, Brothels
with bricks of Religion.”
The North is mere mist, Ion says.
The North is a valve of Night, he goes on.
The North is when you see, I reply.
We circle the clock tower. The shriveled dial
looks like a blind eye socket.
It looks like an ovary ready to be fertilized, Timotei jokes.
Let’s stuff its toothless mouth with our poems,
cries Varlaam. Nonsense, the North is
swamp, slimy weeds, Ion
keeps sputtering.
(On the streets of the city you cannot burst out laughing.
The North is not a problem, cannot become a project; it doesn’t
let itself drop on terraces like a shroud; it won’t hang
from the tops of the fir trees like fog; it won’t
tatter from the roofs like twilight.
Between the lines, the north rests on letters,
and through the mud of writing
it drags the misshapen
animals of Night.)
Ioachim:
“If we’re in the North, does it mean we’ve come
from the East or the South?”
Ion:
“We might come from Nietzsche’s verse: ‘What saith
deep midnight’s voice?’”
We might come from Ricoeur’s cruel text: “When
you enter the poem things invert: is death
now behind you, childhood before?”
Sooner or later all arrive here: within the gloomy bolgias
of the wine cellar. They have perhaps entered a thousand times but
only on that certain day the others will raise
their eyes, and
to them you will become THE ONE WHO ENTERS.
Their hands clutch glasses like knives
cold against your breast. Your neck. Your shoulder blades.
That’s how it is: they all stare. You already are one with the dark
around you. Assert yourself that the North
accept you in its ovaries. That you may be accommodated in its womb.
Its dark clay. As an egg in a nest.
(The stranger, Brother K, cannot be subjugated to
the authority of any line: he may enter
or exit at will.)
“You still don’t know that you must confront the dark—
at home, in your room, in the bathroom mirror.
You still don’t know that the dark is not outside you,
it grows from your flesh like a bud,” a Voice
announces. It shatters the dark of the pub and apostrophizes:
“The North has not yet lost sovereignty
over the lightning that hangs fire...”
(In the wine cellars, under the neon lights, every man
appears a crystal in which ghosts dance,
shades, upon which the words you cry out
swarm like insects.)
Not alcohol but the boundary of the last glass
heralds the North. You sit among the others at
the banquet tables of the century. The wolves’ words and eyes
gleam equally in the night. The North
chooses you: howl!