Ruxandra Cesereanu
from California on the Somes, translated from the Romanian
by Adam Sorkin and Andrei Codrescu
The choir of watchmen: their gazes smelling of musty fur.
After a rain the river was a postcard made of scraps:
corks, shredded plastic, sunglasses, unlabeled cans, a toy gun,
crushed cola bottles, rubber medals, pigeon feathers.
The bloated bladders of drunkards emptied at the foot of the bridge.
A trumpet player bandaged in tinfoil, his arteries clogged by smoke
and alcohol, could not bring the trumpet to his lips.
All this dead weight. All the dead weight.
One day in the old city city I knocked on a poet’s door.
He was not a bona-fide member of our River gang.
When his door opened the glass broke and water invaded my lungs.
We were soaked and speechless. Too timid and to humble to speak.
We held our hands in our laps like the recently widowed.
When we did move we did it only to paint a yellow dot
on our foreheads so that we might recognize one another
or so that we might be found.
The poet was an expert in borders.
I could talk about the zone inside
and the zone outside, and how I always
lingered at the edges.
His voice came from a far shore to calm the waves
and pacify their madness with serene freshness.
I knew that he was a shepherd of birds.
Later we sat on a bench on the city pavestones.
My small wisdom a feather wafted over his head.
My heart beat like a delicate cameo in the breast pocket
of my school uniform.
Suddenly the flash of a camera
captured us and put us in the coffin of a postcard
from the century that passed by us just then like a burning glove.
Myopic under streetlights drunk roosters dove at my eyebrows.
The mown grass shivered on the asphalt.
A boy threw a girl in the Someș after kissing her like a clown,
dogs mated joyfully under the broken benches,
The world was tactile behind all the fences.
Our teeth no longer chattered in our mouths,
our hair no longer fell into the river’s endless cry,
the alarm never rang morning or evening.
It was the summer of luxury: He had become I.
And then we knew:
we grew in the glare of street lights,
we raided infirmaries to confiscate their stores of gauze,
we made tapestries in our skulls with the city’s electrical network.
Once upon a time a train from the Balkans entered the lagoon
between the footings of the bridge.
When I saw the lagoon ripped out of the winter landscape
my mouth trembled, my heart melted.
I dreamt about bringing Venice to the Someș,
with all her obsessions and her germs.
But other signifiers viewed my dreams differently.
I left the Venetian boy, my storyteller of Venezia’s waters
hostage to her silent canals.
The water of the lagoon remained entirely his:
it was but arms of ancient sewers choked by plastic bags.
My city poem roasted in the Someș like buttered corn on the cob,
yellow grains launched hepatitis yellow in my eyes,
the river’s sputum mixed with spinal marrow.
And then we knew:
we wouldn’t fly banners, just memories to keep the heart in working order,
anthems to pump uranium into the blood.
When I was eighteen I climbed San Michele on Capri
and came upon the ruins of a malevolent emperor’s villa.
Here I received a gift from on old priest,
a brown shell knotted like a knee.
I wanted to throw the shell in the Someș,
but I had a weakness for emperors.
For a long time after my wedding, I kept the shell under the bed.
by Adam Sorkin and Andrei Codrescu
The choir of watchmen: their gazes smelling of musty fur.
After a rain the river was a postcard made of scraps:
corks, shredded plastic, sunglasses, unlabeled cans, a toy gun,
crushed cola bottles, rubber medals, pigeon feathers.
The bloated bladders of drunkards emptied at the foot of the bridge.
A trumpet player bandaged in tinfoil, his arteries clogged by smoke
and alcohol, could not bring the trumpet to his lips.
All this dead weight. All the dead weight.
One day in the old city city I knocked on a poet’s door.
He was not a bona-fide member of our River gang.
When his door opened the glass broke and water invaded my lungs.
We were soaked and speechless. Too timid and to humble to speak.
We held our hands in our laps like the recently widowed.
When we did move we did it only to paint a yellow dot
on our foreheads so that we might recognize one another
or so that we might be found.
The poet was an expert in borders.
I could talk about the zone inside
and the zone outside, and how I always
lingered at the edges.
His voice came from a far shore to calm the waves
and pacify their madness with serene freshness.
I knew that he was a shepherd of birds.
Later we sat on a bench on the city pavestones.
My small wisdom a feather wafted over his head.
My heart beat like a delicate cameo in the breast pocket
of my school uniform.
Suddenly the flash of a camera
captured us and put us in the coffin of a postcard
from the century that passed by us just then like a burning glove.
Myopic under streetlights drunk roosters dove at my eyebrows.
The mown grass shivered on the asphalt.
A boy threw a girl in the Someș after kissing her like a clown,
dogs mated joyfully under the broken benches,
The world was tactile behind all the fences.
Our teeth no longer chattered in our mouths,
our hair no longer fell into the river’s endless cry,
the alarm never rang morning or evening.
It was the summer of luxury: He had become I.
And then we knew:
we grew in the glare of street lights,
we raided infirmaries to confiscate their stores of gauze,
we made tapestries in our skulls with the city’s electrical network.
Once upon a time a train from the Balkans entered the lagoon
between the footings of the bridge.
When I saw the lagoon ripped out of the winter landscape
my mouth trembled, my heart melted.
I dreamt about bringing Venice to the Someș,
with all her obsessions and her germs.
But other signifiers viewed my dreams differently.
I left the Venetian boy, my storyteller of Venezia’s waters
hostage to her silent canals.
The water of the lagoon remained entirely his:
it was but arms of ancient sewers choked by plastic bags.
My city poem roasted in the Someș like buttered corn on the cob,
yellow grains launched hepatitis yellow in my eyes,
the river’s sputum mixed with spinal marrow.
And then we knew:
we wouldn’t fly banners, just memories to keep the heart in working order,
anthems to pump uranium into the blood.
When I was eighteen I climbed San Michele on Capri
and came upon the ruins of a malevolent emperor’s villa.
Here I received a gift from on old priest,
a brown shell knotted like a knee.
I wanted to throw the shell in the Someș,
but I had a weakness for emperors.
For a long time after my wedding, I kept the shell under the bed.