Verglas

Constantin Pricop

Verglas

Traduction du roumain en anglais d'Alexandru Pricop

The Abyss may open where you don’t expect it…

The Abyss may open anywhere

In what may appear livelier than anything

May the abyss open its jaws

It is not important to understand

Out of the blue, you are face to face with the void

You wake up

The Others don’t see anything, there is something look at you

Only you

The elephants always move forward, impassively 

(No? No! -The jester answers…)

And suddenly a gaze which is not 

A gaze opens in your view

An eye which cannot see in your eye which sees

Wait for me, you wish to say

But you say nothing. 

She stretches her arms

She stretches her arms

That’s all

I don’t know if this happens during the morning or the evening

She believes she can fly

But nothing happens, nothing.

In her eyes, I saw her eyes:

Terror, longing, cold

So, she does not see it daily

She is absorbed by her gaze that is launched very far

Towards infinity,

Or something similar

A line of light, steel once muscle

In mute penumbra 

And over the planet the curtain fell

And discussions over everything began

Right this moment.

Cheap coincidence.

I watch her

I watch her as she watches

She watches her palms

Her right palm

A simple leaf of a small palm tree

Her left palm a paw which unsheathes its claws

On the face of the day its left-hand leaves profound marks

Inside the day, the most hurtful place

The bats come out of the gallery

Explosion

That’s it.

Memory

I go through memory as if through the big frozen north

From an icepack to another

Small icepack

From an episode to another

Between fragments filled until overflow with cold

(made solid in their isolation, in their own dead souls)

A restless sea

I don’t know why it jumps like this

From a ragged memory to another

Instead of a slow fall

In darkened depths

True life, you say?

Disorder, warm animality of bodies…

No signs of punctuation

Perpetually drifting.

A Spring

It was a seraphic 

Spring which I have never relived …

With wind still fresh

With patches of fog where the sun was already radiating

Birds are not flying.

The air is heavy, acid

The end of the sky embarrassingly withers

The sky being the bottom of a reserved aquarium. Poisoned. 

Dead leaves pierced with green

I am here to seek the new grass.

Under the dead layer, the bells of the mushrooms

Love…refreshes... drifted apart…

Edible Mushrooms; Poisonous Mushrooms

Fixing the night

Fixing the night in front of my eyes.

Mirror with a handle.

Behind her

Everything which was held

In the air

By the strings

Of light rays

Falls

A type of paste of darkness

Glues to the fingers

Opaque color

Fur freshly skinned

From an object or another

Warm blood

Studs

Made of Nickel

And crocodiles with 

Toothy smiles

Exercise in forgetting 

For a long time

I regularly practice exercises in forgetting

There are so many things worth forgetting

Some because they are not anymore,

Others, due to them being too many

To forget to not suffocate 

(obviously…)

That is how I view

Through the metallic cracks of the clouds

Clouds of Zinc

Clouds of Iron

Clouds of Copper

Every second

They suck out from us fine particles

Look at us, being sucked out by the metallic clouds

While I was doing my exercise to forget

Today I forgot the numbers

What’s left, tomorrow 

4th of September 1998

Have you been happy?

(Let’s be, serious, I wish to say)

I didn’t answer

I left the question to fall

A withered leaf, a ball of lint

Nobody waits for it 

A trifle, what else…

The Scene from Dieppe with a mild sun, very tender

(this, obviously, for décor) 

At the end of the afternoon

Which strangulates the beach of pebbles

I saw a fort, or something

Like that that. I like to watch 

With intensity, until the point in which I see

Blue beings, translucid and

Quiet, which calmly fly

Through the sky, above us

Towards the sea

To launch itself in the dusk

Nobody realises

The children are peacefully playing

As if nothing had happened

The Seagulls

Look for remnants along the paths