Amor Poem

There was a lunar eclipse on tv, really stammering
the Sunday we were together, in a fluorescent bulb prison commiserating
commiserating, grinning, whining wrapped in Chinese Cherry wine, I was
burning gas and biting your neck, biting your jewelry, biting your reflection in the glass
and if you remember, we went to make crepes where coins clanked
on the kitchen window of the Dîmbovi?a Mill for the ghosts of exterminated rats
and its silo was made of real brick, there was nothing metaphysical which excited you
and your breasts were emanating from you in the winter twilight
like they were vibrations in a children’s classroom over stationary and light bulb casings
there was nothing metaphysical, just tempered anxiety, a little screech of purple cellophane
in the sublingual hallways
there was a tap of two fingers on two poorly insulated wires
and in that lunatic kitchen you showed your clear, transparent self, like a two hundred
thousand carat gem
and I saw through to the digestive system
death.

I saw her leaning against the iron fence of the pulmonology clinic next to the general military
directorate
stopping a kid on the sidewalk, sending them for a newspaper or bread rolls
I saw death sending for a newspaper and bread rolls in the pinkest, most incomparable dusk
I saw her on the trolleybus dismal and decrepit, her paws in dirty, white-knit gloves
reaching for the crossbar at the front door
begging in a voice that squeaked past black skin, grabbing at skirts and braving the glassy
looks of fox lives
biting the driver, and yogurt generations reigned in her stomach among the sweets, Turkish
delights and cookies
I saw her stomach galloping the plains of sequined bikini bottoms on a pillow of air
and her lungs inhaling oneiric, silvery liquids and gold-thread representations
in the oriental, mystical hole of a bar and, lo, it was the season of assassins
and she danced in your heart, cartilage and bones, giving the effect of blue light
I saw her talking over a cognac, talking into a microphone, talking with her mouth full
and playing guitar in bed
and the talking glacier caps, glacial hemispheres
talking on and on about Marcuse, talking about Antonioni, Stratan, dyes and grammar, talking
in certitudes about the same labyrinth in hypertrophy
and I saw death unnatural, death made in a lab
and death that ignites like an oil well
and her unconscious rolls out through earwigs and bisulfite in hordes
over universities and statues and athenaeums and chains of lakes
and in front of the opera, reduces Enescu’s statue into a giant rattrap
and hides it under the chairs at the Tosca confectionary
I saw her black, flabby body eating the north-south metro line, razing earth
and hanging there like a sin spider from the web of sewerage
I saw death as a monkey dressed like a sailor
staring at me from the third deck through sad, red eyes
weighing on the chimpanzee encephalon, undeveloped, pedunculated
I saw her delousing for rubies around the pancreas and liver
I saw her carrying refrigerators, licking stamps and clipping together written-on pages
yawning without covering her mouth at sublime sunrises stinking of bromide and aphrodisiac
they peeled back my conscience, hidden under polyps and tonsils, with methylene blue
and I recognized her in the dimwit drawings on matchbooks…
paralogue of beauty, you used to know so many jokes.
and mother lined my pockets with memories from before war and marriage
and I let her hands, both dulled and sharpened, do a complicated operation on my brain
and a more complicated extraction of my heart.
long before the passage to downtown was built, winter came
and people were still swarming there underground, as if guided by the anticipation of a scent
and there the foreigners would pay on the terrace where the intercontinental hotel is now,
cigarettes lit
where embryonic kittens were groping down streets next to pastry shop steam
was I complicated? oh, bacteria came to me like to a shop or museum
the skin covering my skull was cooing the tired usurper’s semantic aura
and my ears were listening to the internal rapture gurgling
and joining the apocalyptic calamity of the boulevards with cinemas
pouting beauty, the garter belt of night unbinds orchestral fetish in sleepwalkers
the child I was, right now, ducking into a bosom,
his bangs make a brilliant slipcover draped over chairs and floor lamps
without a body, going into the bathroom barefoot
to cover blemishes in the mirror with the pinkish foam of after shave
and squeezing toothpaste out in the w/c of tile
looking directly into my eyes as the cerebral hemisphere flaps them quiet
and kind.

love, amor, erotic… Bauhaus architecture hooched up like daiquiri in champagne glasses
blood red tracings of all the lipstick ruj
she would be called a legacy and should give us the heraldic dementia of Mateiu Caragiale
and the universality of the Pi?cu commune. But I think you prefer rather clonic motions
and the great, hysterical crisis
you prefer countless dresses and feelings fitting to your breasts
prefer the person never losing sight of your hypnotic figure, in his old, watery eyes
never in the aldehyde of twilight, never broken
in whose arms you’re brought to orgasm like a jelly fish of flowing humor and reflexes
who calms you, and keeps you,
and before your beautiful face, holds a mirror
to see yourself, moonstruck, smiling…
to see the little girl and young woman and whore and mother and electra and old biddy and
matron and virgin
lymphatic, sanguine, heartbroken and choleric and unchanged
death,
smiling…

the lunar eclipse stammered so badly the screen shattered, burying us in a rainbow of broken
glass
and the bricks at the Dîmbovi?a mill were like an Atlantic fortress submerged
and we received desperate calls from the winter twilight outside in fists beating greatcoats on
our backs
directing us to the first cherub, first star, first vegetable…
there was nothing metaphysical: the coo of dump trucks, our intestines
decorating the winter tree with electric stars
oh, if the eyes of the tablecloth could speak to your bra
you, yourself, could throw purple cellophane balls down my sublingual hallways
we can love each other, we can praise each other, we make love, we can sleep together
we can touch each other in the cold of conscience, we can bite our cheeks
with lace molars
we can replace a spongy death, in fluorescent nothing, for a diamond
two hundred thousand carat death.