1. The Barren Woman

2. The Rhetorical Drug

3. the first. The second

4. faces of the same poem

5. and then It All Turned

6. blessing in Unison

7. but they didn’t beat you

8. Even If It came about

9. Sonatina

10. fluttering Here and There over the Sloughs

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE barren woman

 

 

the barren woman imagines she’s giving birth

she twists in the sheets and heaves herself about

she sprawls spraddling her legs against the wall

she thrusts and convulses

runs rivers of sweat

and calls me by name

she even gives birth to me

only she feels how the unseen crown of my head

bursts out through her sex unreceptive to seed

only she hears me gasp and squall

she gnaws my umbilical cord of shadow

and she fondles my head and body

with eager hands

 

the barren woman licks her faceless whelp

her skinless and heartless cub

only she strokes me and knows me

and suckles me on her nut-like pap

I nurse without a sound

and then let slip the delicate nipple and fall asleep

baring my gums and teeth of mist

 

 

(translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Radu Andriescu)

 

 

The Rhetorical Drug

 

 

a more violent burning in the cells

that should make you believe yourself inspired so raise

your fist against the sky and shout or else fill

countless pages that

must astonish you the next day reminding you of

stories about daimons and gods

 

wherefrom comes that feast of metaphors

in a country so poor wherefrom

such perverse refinement of enjambment

rhythm and alliteration wherefrom

the virgin-bride freshness

of comparisons when

 

habitually you run disgusted eyes

over facades over faces over pediments

finding paltry and infrequent repose

in the dazzling homelands: reflections halos and other

unanticipated apparitions

looming out of memory

 

the rhetorical drug time brilliant and rarefied

like a comet’s tail

a more violent burning in the cells

god incarnated from endocrine

glands

 

 

(translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Radu Andriescu)

 

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)

 

 

faces of the same poem

 

 

books trees fortresses women

faces of the same poem

which I sink into

with fewer and fewer words

 

I could talk about heroes and about wars

or about the colors of autumn in the orchards

—a sunset lingering as long as the season—

about the explosion of a litmus drop

about the water dance of lithium

or about the golden skull of a girl

gleaming among the domes of moscow

about the bony hieroglyphs of the beggars

about the groaning of ice floes and empires

about the puff-ball of dandelions and the puff of quarks

I could try a planetary rhetoric

kneading into one dough geography politics and syntax

or at random I could choose some nouns

and show you how children play at god

 

were I younger or at least were I

the old man of these times

 

 

                        (translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Radu Andriescu)

 

 

and then It All Turned

 

 

but if I’m nothing more than a survivor       (here’s

my real voice I put to rout the plaster

angels I made all the muses take flight I closed the treatises       I

forgot everything altogether       I’m looking out the window

into another world       I’m looking in the mirror into another world

life has come and gone       and death had come and gone       only my blood

keeps flowing only my heart keeps beating       it’s evening

but it isn’t evening       only on earth is there evening

 

I’d believed in words believed in god believed in country I’d tried to be happy

 

and then it all turned to shit)

 

 

                                (translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Radu Andriescu)

 

 

blessing in Unison

 

 

like a herd of wild boars we would chase

through the tender pubescent oaks of spring

driven crazy by scents and sap

and by the sweaty croups

of the females

 

with our sharp teeth we would nip left and right

always in sweet sport

we would swallow the raw meat and bellow deeply

licking the blood from our beards

 

yow! how their red swollen cunts were steaming

and how yellow hot arousing juices went streaming down their gams and how

their black nipples split open

and how wet they glistened like forests in the spring

 

with our nostrils to the wind we would halt for a moment stunned

breathing the swamp of those scents

we were drowning in so much strength and so much desire

and then we would spring forth again snorting and roaring

 

so many hot pieces were left behind on the grass torn apart merely flesh and blood and seed others broad and deep would wander suffocating and gnawing us with their white teeth shaking us and pressing us against their thighs rumbling like the earth when split open by earthquakes

 

none of us had any escape we were still too much alive

everything within us was merely life merely death merely life it seems only just now that we are learning to throw jeers and sneering curses back at the god

blessing in unison

the crowns of our unborn children’s heads

 

 

                                (translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Radu Andriescu)

 

 

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)

Even If It came about

 

    “for the stripes of the tiger”

  —Borges

 

if I returned

I’d be sure not to have a clue

I’d drop my cup of tea I’d slosh

the spoon before it could reach my mouth

smiling and timid I’d stumble over

the carpets

 

I’d be killed and thrown sprinkled with lime into the pit

at the back of the garden

or like a baby be fed by a devoted woman

a woman whose hands became more cracked

and split day after day

her thick fingers swollen

stiffer and stiffer

 

and even if this kind of

heartrending fate came to pass

what good would it do to learn to walk again

if I went wandering down the same path on which

today I certainly don’t have the slightest clue

– there are nights

when my body flutters like a scarf–

I couldn’t possibly it’s not possible one can’t

return

 

 

                                  (translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Radu Andriescu)

 

 

Sonatina

 

            to Nichita Stănescu

 

but drunk he’d acquire the grace

of an elephant soaring in flight

during any prolonged libation

he gradually became very light

 

golden and plasmatic he ascended

diaphanous bubble of blubber, a spirit

and amidst women and colonnades

he whirled in a giddy and tight pirouette

 

a delicate and frail behemoth

he bowed low sang shrilly and laughed

with a baby’s crying chortle

but then suddenly he started to drift

 

above us his hands waving in swim strokes

and his legs flailing in comical kicks

some of us roared supposing him playing

to others it seemed he was dying

 

with an accomplice’s smirk we raised our glasses

and emptied them sort of thoughtful and slow

sipping suspended as under a trance

 

and at last in our lisping tongues

we invited the women to dance

 

 

                                (translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Radu Andriescu)

 

 

fluttering Here and There over the Sloughs

 

 

I want to strangle you until your eyes pop out big and white like toad bellies

and your tongues protrude long and purple like a pig’s spleen

I want to mutilate your ugly mugs to punch in my fist as into dough

I want to crack open your skulls to squeeze that pus-pouch you

have the effrontery to call a brain

I want to trample you to pummel you beneath my heels

to pulverize your bones with a sledge hammer

to pound you with jackhammers

to crush you into pulp in hydraulic presses

I want to make you into an amorphous paste which I spit on which I piss in

I want to flush you away with a hydrant’s force

and shove the glob of you into a public wc

to muck you up into rusty buckets with shovels

and pour you into troughs

I want to vomit on your gruesome gruel

all that you forced me to swallow for thirty years

all that I couldn’t chew all that I rejected in disgust

my cells everything

everything everything almost the whole of myself

until two wings are all that remains gossamer transparent

a white butterfly

fluttering here and there over the sloughs

 

 

                        (translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Radu Andriescu)

 

Poems by O. Nimigean