the waves

_ _ _

_ _ _

_ _ _

_ _ _

_ _ _

_ _ _

_ _ _

_ _ _

for you do not describe the past...

Nacre upon nacre upon nacre, bluish upon bluish upon bluish, each age and each house in which I have dwelled (if it was not all a hallucination of nothingness) is a filter deforming the previous one, blending itself with them, making them narrower and more heterogenous bands. For you do not describe the past by writing about old things, but the misty air between you and it.

Thinking about myself at different ages, as so many consumed previous lives, it is as though I spoke about a long, uninterrupted chain of corpses, a tunnel of bodies dying one within the other. A moment ago, the one who, reflected by the dark lacquer of the coffee cup, had written here the words “dying one within the other” collapsed off the stool, his skin cracked, the bones of his face became visible, his eyes leaked out oozing black blood. In a moment, the one who will write “the one who will write” will also collapse down upon the other’s dust. How could you penetrate this ossuary? And why would you do so? And what gauze mask, what surgical gloves would protect you from the infection emanated by memory?

from Mircea Cărtărescu's novel Orbitor, translated into English as  Glaring (vol. 1)

.

this is reality

why is it that you need to show three glasses when even one glass holds more emptiness than wine could ever fill? do you think that paint coming off the wall symbolizes loss and decay of the soul - generally speaking? or perhaps your own, tiny wound? do you think that flowers lose petals for the sake of your weeping? don't you see that you are still saying this and that, and your speech is flowing over the brim of every empty glass you might show?

i haven't invented anything, i pleaded, this is what i found on the balcony when i could finally bring myself to open that door, there was even a small heap of ashes there, which i could not get into my frame. this is exactly what i saw. somebody smoked there every night, the window wide-open, before leaving. some-body. a body pushing against the wall. this is what was left behind. this is reality.

you haven't looked properly.

furiously, after much pondering and fighting against myself, i weighed all the lines of the composition and went around them for many days, in search of the perfect angle. i removed one glass. still, it didn't seem enough. with one glass left, i was much closer to the truth, it seemed. yet it too needed to be broken into pieces. i handed you the barren landscape.

still overflowing, i see.

why the many crumbles, when even one grain of sand is enough to reflect the moon?

like this, like this? i asked, scraping off this layer of my self, and another one, and another still. when the new, perfectly empty vistas of my gaze presented themselves to you, i myself had long been gone, fading away like a whisper or some animal's breath in the icy air.

yet what one stared at now, from beyond the silence, was nothing less than three empty glasses, stained, full of ashes and dregs, placed on an old print of one of her photographs, fallen petals scattered across the table, paint coming off the mildewed walls of the balcony where someone would smoke late at night, and once bit her lips when kissing her against the frozen window, dust on the wooden table, the wet grayness of the air - each of the thousand colours alive and exact, each of the myriads of hues precisely delineated, the smallest detail of the smallest curve and angle present with all its impossible truthfulness.

..

romantic palimpsest, revisited

you said:

"one may ask all the questions, but one should not"

i don't even think you knew then
about my love for grammar, the awe-struck trembling
in front of the countless doors hidden in modal verbs,
opened and slammed in my face
every minute.

now, when the summer light has lost its gentleness,
when it cuts through the curve of my thigh as ruthlessly
as an indicative,
i ask:

why did you say i was beautiful?

why did you say my hair smelled like red moss
under cedar trees?

why did you say you wanted us to look at each other
the same way as then, as long as we lived?
(i smiled, amused at this image,
coming from one like you, with your deep disdain for romantic
pose and sentimentalism, we were both, damn it, too old
for rose and myrrh -
but too young to know how to look at a face hiding a face
and another face and yet another face,
an endless labyrinth of deception.
i believed it, though, there was something hard and warm
and true in there
like the heaviness of your touch upon me,
beyond modal verbs,
a kiss like a bird in a mouth
who hadn't yet learned to tell the poem
about kiss and mouth).

why did you say you wanted me to have all the books
you had ever read?

























now, inside the walls of this living library
i, the captive, am free to run from modal verb to modal verb
waiting in vain for a flutter of page to hurt my blood,
for light to break your absence
like bread upon my skin, yet again.

















..

autumn palimpsest

why do you keep re-writing
the faces of what has already been,
layer upon layer of feverish scribble?
the past cannot be altered,
the stranger said, his amber voice
stern.

i stood there broken,
the quiet of the dead for my only flame.
oh if the sky could know of the loneliness
of its blue.

outside, the tree was gently falling
into autumn, unaware that it did so,
and why.

and how hard i wished for the time of the tree,
how hard.


.
.