Improvisations on Armonic Key.In memoriam Igor Stravinsky

English version by Dan Nicolae Popescu

I. Allegro

1.
a beginning
decapitated like a shadow’s gesture on a black sheet of paper

a closeness of meaning
by Your face with veins like a Japanese poem
- juxtaposition into the abyss -
allows life

intense is any fusion of memory
with the firebird
that succeeds muteness
thus the salamander and the nimbus of rubbish
the city wearing gloves of cosmic verbs
whose tissue annihilates any description
limpid towers and borders
of future flesh
may spend the night into the light
that afforests deep sea

2.
someday we shall be living texts
into the blinding stomach of a sunken city
exactly within the word ‘city’

3.
threatened by the limpidity preceding memory

soon melancholy will transpierce time’s traffic
under the apple-trees’ summery skin

pairs of lovers curve
their fluid silhouettes

amidst stamina and ink shrouds

from book to book
the dead will then ascend
into the paper’s open pores

from sheet to sheet
the body turns into a look’s relief
that absorbs you

4.
it was the body of a look
an idiom of motionlessness
a stain of gravitation
into the wall’s cool letters
a comma cemented in the olive-green
light

I was the passer-by with blackened pace
pursued by that narcotized image
an emanation of absence

which craves fulfillment
like a wall
whereupon nerves imagine
the frightening disegno interno
between me and you

5.
I grab a banjo with its wood
polished by the being’s beamy meaning
and gradually I see myself again amidst musical comets
I am my only present
I say it again and the echo liquefies both moon and words
yesterday I am the future
repeats my yonder image
and irreal fingers touch the world’s tremulous horizon

there’s a tornado between me and you
wherein I search myself – a bird-of-paradise flower in my hand
among the darkly faces from the past
that flow into my blood at lightspeed
while decapitated bodies
dance hula on the other side of time

I am the negative memory of the sky
I’d like to cry but crying falls down crumpled
into the halo in between two angels
I’d like to scream but words bear fire meanings
that collapse beyond the words themselves
I’d like to touch you but my hand slithers
on time’s convex surface
yesterday I’m on the verge of shredding a thousand lotus flowers
from my chunk of future
rolled over on the streets lit by electric lap steel guitars
the soldier sits on an old buoy instead of chair
in the shack where lives the laundress with fly-bitten thighs
solidified light cracks the walls
made of dirty planks
while it caresses her flabby breasts like ragdolls
until the fretwork
the ropes discarded on silken cocoons
the artificial anemones and black stockings
smeared with gas oil
the clarinet rotting on the stack of old newspapers
become one with a ragtime
for eleven instruments

it’s late and bats traverse
“the net and lapidary structure of motifs
the dry and sharp linearity
of brass interjections
the explosive incisiveness of rhythms
the asymmetric disposition of measures
and the frequent shifting of accents
the discursive ellipses
the rough timbral oppositions”

I grab a banjo with furbished skin

6.
you soldier marching on streets with drawn shutters
from no one to no one propping your leaves
into a sonorous haze that detaches you from things

you write events with all of your body’s ink
already rotting under its lethal dose of future
cover with your campaign blanket
the beautiful corpses
of verbal suffering

you sip a drink of water
that separates you
from your mouth

you are not a maneuver of grammatical
sentences
on command

II. Andante

1.
everything you search for searches itself along with you
until the roads scrape
into speechless cascades
on the being’s lunar face

all you see sees itself along with you
until the rain of eyes hachures
the muscular meanings
with such a moist blinding

everything you hear hears itself along with you
until a whirl of ears
submerges your head
tumefied with silence

everything you touch feels itself along with you
until the skin under feverish tactile concentration
garments the words’ meanings
with luminescent sores

everything you smell inhales itself along with you
until a lilac grove
explodes into
your attentive nostrils

2.
a thunderbolt in May
a girl in the overflowing bathtub
bedewed by the lilac grove

3.
I can no longer touch the silvery muscles
of the verb ‘to be’
- white somersault like a summer thunderbolt
in one syllable -
and Your name coagulates my hands
unto a shapeless page
now and beyond and only

you gifted me a steed
a word with elongated jaws
kinetic tattoo of the hillocks
but its body abated
the warm etheric vowels

I could see a wall outstretching from A to dawn
And the clouds rotating foamy streets

4.
out of the universe lines of the scream
benighted in invisible flames above the city
you twist toward the silky haze
emerging from a horse’s saddle back

your left half’s made of dew
which trickles into the innocent country
with erect architectures
made up by lovers’ names

from the scream’s lines develops
the mould of the reverberating face
on streets befrothed with echoes

and in the bridge’s reddish shadow
your calcareous shade
embraces your being

5.
she was an image in a trance
she was the word and the X-ray of muteness
the mask padded by dreams
nobody unto nobody unto nobody

she was so beautiful
with her body hachured by the universe’s thoughts
like a poem that curves its time
while becoming meaning

she was an inferno of innocences
and I could hear her face discharging its shadow
in myriads of sensitive flashlights
of hands

a caress was a cosmic act
and the nothingness proper
and yet and yet
the epidermis’ sound devoured the brickwork’s ugliness

6.
embracing her at night
the white lilac bed
flowed into the clouds

7.
this is my place
the immense realm of a name
a portico the shade of which is broken
where heart’s place is

here I am dreamed of by the sonorous plasma
my hands severed by the dream
the lines of destiny float on the sweaty page
unto a look peeled off its eye

there’s nothing to be done
all movements are caged in guinea pig axioms
the words exhale volatile trains
toward a station with put-off departures

8.
weary of old sceneries
the yellow earth atomized by texts
waves my room’s fluid curtain
echoing the rustle of autumn leaves

your mouth a pulsar calligraphied
in the melodious chiaroscuro
the infinite vowel from the name
that disconnects your body from the aurora

the present is no more save for a shade of passage
the comet that undoes the edge of things
into an ocean of historic orbits

how can one stop the metastasis of illusion
the illness that swells your look and hands
the city crushing obscure directions hidden into children’s blood

only hearing your steps among images
do I attempt to discontinue reality’s course
through language construction
at any rate imagination is not a wall
through the porous words burst
the gracious stems of pneumatic tubs
the abstractly perfumed petals of cooling fans
the motor oil rainbow
the matter’s magic river
the great plains of calculi
the air concreted by noises steam vibrations

the heart has not the color of nature

III. Minuet-trio

the old man drinks his coffee by the vending machine in the library
afterwards allowing himself to be slit from his own distance
by the quantic intimacy of the pages

he then disperses the cigarette ash into a sidereal sentence
it is a message that will somehow have been
or is by not pertaining to himself
how could one detach his centrifugal vowels
from the filigree of infomatter

- the typewriter and the voice’s
crumpled shadow
the somber innocence from the curvature of the word ‘life’
during a dusk that grows into putrescent fruit -

the hands with their skin rolled on the ‘The End’ screen
bespeak a radioactive insertion into all events
the hands are lonely like the larva of an image unto black space
he is lonely with his morbid predicate breath

our body shall emerge from an extinct language
the billionth of a letter
can turn the decomposing dream
on the other side

a tomorrow of yore

2.
aided by a time-orphaned moment
you save
the estrangement from yourself

3.
it’s raining on the shockproof windshield
over statistic roofs
into imagination’s blood spittoons

it’s raining with a blast of losses
that falls upon me

my red eyelids burst open
into blind happenings that have no right
to be

it’s raining on the runways of interchangeable sureties
into the lifebelt-wearing poem
asphyxiated by its mother’s ink

- memory puckers on itself -

I’m running under the narcosis of a verse
moved by the modulations of the elongated fetus
into the being’s nebula

it’s raining and I have no right
I have no right
to be

4.
you run and submerge along with the road
in the moist froth of her gestures
lies the springtime that greens her voice
or her far yonder shadow
more real than any scream

5.
I was leaving the municipal stadium
thwarting the bodies’ agglutinating texture
- silk and cooling ashes -
just pondering how I got lost
both inside and around you

then I saw a dead man
inside of a just-then cheek
and whose cathedral was entering the poem
a dead man bespread with vast sceneries
unto the grayish driftage of his skin

and you yourself were moving down
a staircase made of scented wood

6.
I have met the world
into a limitless you

7.
in autumn the word ‘light’ becomes deformed
and fumes
on manuscripts galactic cities
inhabited by aphasic crowds

- pitching into an apple’s gloss -

the eggplant toaster crystallizes a mist
with thousands of ovoid layers
through which alien hands liquefy
their original tissue
on the banister of the word ‘autumn’

your body in the kitchen’s windowsill
vibrates like the nocturnal pellicle
of the unseen’s
fever

in autumn death’s harmony is alive

8.
a butterfly set on fire
by the streetcar’s flash
petals emerging from the memory of the wing

9.
your dream of building a house
inside a whirlwind of texts
while kneading mills grind landscapes of fever and gold
- syntax and collapse
echoing the rustle of leaves in autumn -

the grass can no longer stand the fiction of the cube
in the city with bars cinematographs and ferrous salts
happiness is a mask of music
a vertical stereophony of blood and spirit
a page opened between all times
and half the sand watch in the puppets’ skulls

cars pass by and no friend around
solitude shuts down the nights of all the passers-by
like a drop of blood
the second’s ray
the music time’s diaphanous love-making
spends the night into the web
of reason’s variable points
- warm fingerprints into a comeback -
dance dance the footsteps accelerate
the ripple of the invisible

the words are black lesions

unto the pure sound
echoing the rustle of leaves in autumn

you’re looking back in vain through bugles
your forehead imprinted on the phases of the moon
no friend around only passengers
high into the kinetic tower suspended on a cloud
of auriferous insomnias
vultures in the power of the golden number
golden citadels golden commercials
golden roses and yet the golden bread
that tastes of ash

IV. Presto

1.
today I write no more
my nib suddenly dilates
the whitish sky between the letters

it is the first night of spring
a jazz band of angels illuminate
dimensions unto which I wake
as from a slumber of objects paralyzed on the page

what am I doing amidst these phonetic planets
of death
I perhaps you only thus
with bodies resurrected before birth
by the rejective heart

- as if I were transcribing entrails of gods
who read me -

it is the first night of spring
mute fever
and suffering precede significance

it is the first night a void of letters
draws me one sentence closer
to the stones

2.
you wait into the purest sanctuary
a house that coagulates the features of a face
along with the horizon
into a tender floating drawing
among Minoan columns

maybe someday
you’ll breathe outside the torture chamber
of time intertwined with life
suspended by symphonic psalms

you’ll copy in blood the being’s
tender silhouette
among Minoan columns

your being is here
torn into shreds of amazement
only by avid looks with cigarette pulse

suddenly cicatrized into iridescent eyes
by countless possible lives
among Minoan columns

whereto shall we look
so as to see our look

3.
when on high

behind you curved
tall landscapes
of skies and waters

the spring’s celebration
illuminated
the breath of the invisible

the body thundered with new forms and meanings
erecting soft cities
with walls of luminous sensations
in keeping with the perfect grammar of the angels

fragments of streets muddled
into the cone of passage
and the heart undid ever more rarely
the evening’s stitches into the abyss

when on high

4.
to be the molding of this poem

5.
somebody was dancing into the luminescent
halo
with kinetic ideograms which shaped the hands
and thighs crystallizing a muteness
overflowed with voices

the music blunted edges
between bodies and words
the eyes from the shadow’s extra flat brain
wherein we fell embraced in savory disappearance

somebody was dancing into the halo of octaves
with fluid moves like bible paper
that extracted from the trivial sleep
a landscape with traces of white and red blood cells

white and red

6.
I was in search of new meanings by banishing the firebird
upon the dilated field of imagination
beyond my shadow’s ball of thread
the real’s armor was almost perfect

I knew nothing about myself anymore
when suddenly with fingers torn
from imaginary hands
I touched its warm and empty notime

it was a creature of points
with an abyss on its left side
captive inside the walls of a music
so silky in its inner hours

the creature was passing its face irradiated by the unseen dew
of a spaceless and timeless streets
where the day is a nocturnal hemorrhage of meanings
illuminating a negative heart

it was the bull’s-eye whereinto
two worlds electrocuted by a dream looked at each other
slowly the forms detached themselves from things
floating on the horizon of a waterproof thought

7.
your face
suddenly twisted into a leave’s
last thought

8.
it was late at night and too late in the world
belated passers-by overburdened you with late roses
high in the atavistic sky with brittle angels
turtle doves with fluffy plumage and trolleybuses

it was late and your body was late left behind
guarded by long-tail-hair girls with speedy silhouettes
that sever the bluish fog that the blind can see
into the streets’ metaphysical ball of thread

it was late in the depth of lateness
and joy a sad matter of language
and sometime late you estranged from yourself

9.
“music has often appeared to me in dreams
but I wasn’t able to put it down
save for once
while I was writing the soldier’s story
the result surprised and enchanted me

I could discern not only the music
but also its player
it was a young gypsy woman
by the side of a road
she held a baby on her knees
and played the violin to cheer him up

the motif she was endlessly repeating
was played with the whole fiddlestick
the music delighted the little one
who was applauding with his tiny hands

she delighted me too
I was fortunate to be able to remember it
And integrated this motif in my little concerto”

10.
when I last could see myself
I sat alone with a cigarette turned like an electrode
toward the heart

my face was a palette of old cracked languages
with a blue eczema of light
in the curve of its profile

and I could no longer descend
the spiral stairway polished by the fever of ladies of yore
then they hammered nails into my windowsills

11.
a new eclipse into its dense clarity
coagulates a horizon
of figural objects

the orchestra keeps on drawing
diaphanous sonorous textures
within the web filtered by magic and silence
petruschka can be easily caught
into the levitation of a nebulous move

“as if they were burning ever slower
all the elements of his music
disclosing its true skeleton
rhythm”

it has become a pulsation of images on an unseen face
under which collapses the golden orbit
the stone unto flesh
the thought unto God

amplification of space
through transparency
sometimes the shadow shadow shadow
no longer imitates imitates imitates

Suceava, 1995