The
Bo(a)rders
Sycamores plaster the
house’s exterior walls. When we would unwittingly open the door and enter, the
house’s mirrors would bend to collect our shadows. It was before daybreak.
You don your disguise, the
peasant’s blouse, shadow-sewn. Without handrail, the immense stairwell ascends
before us. We ascend into the looking glasses, then backtrack and arrive at the
step from where we started. A certain coordinate of movements tempts us. We
avoid the peril of the windowsill.
In plainer garments you
would laugh. We are the spectacular ridicule of black lace on the final step.
If we opened the skylight and climb naked into the sky the deportations would
begin the following day. Rain would fall erratic, waves flood through the
windows.
So we climb down a belated ladder through the translucent floor and
discharge the rival army, reward it with cities and ports.
On the threshold
My cheeks spread
on the ground
Is it gold? I
whisper
Gold
Will they save
themselves before daybreak?
In a doorway, a
threshold hooded, wearing a vast despair, is chained to the sky
When nights
begin in the morning, I’ll show them the way
You’ll welcome
them
We’ll return
upstairs to drown at home, someone will arrive, and the house will, at last, be
rented
These phosphorescent
eyes, these monstrous leaps, who will play?
Trees will thus
leaf at a quickened pace
Does daybreak
manage to save them?
Your cheeks
spread on the threshold stunt a laurel
A human tongue?
Tonight it will
rain
From a deadman’s
mouth
They’ll go there barefoot. They’ll collide in the dark. They’ll believe
in gold.
“The Bo(a)rders” and “On the Threshold” come
from a new body of work (currently in process). Plucked and composed out of the
field of my own translations of Paul Celan’s early Romanian poems, they border
and traverse the porous body of his languages.
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