The Pyramid of Cheops on the Sacred Donkey’s Back…

For today’s reality,  I need a stout metaphor

and a highly ethereal one, as large as the soul and its angel –

a multilayered metaphor, its ground floor made of an emerald

turtle, its first floor made of a porcelain elephant,

and its pagoda-garret of motley butterflies…

“I’ve told you once, since I can’t curse Sisyphus,

when, in a rage, he placed the pyramid of Cheops, on the sacred

donkey’s back – a peaceful grazer among the dill umbels,

naturally, like the metropolitan donkey –, shouting to the beast : to be born

once more, to be overburdened with the whole Man-Mountain in the saddle

on its arched backbone, forever horizontalised,

and then to run for its life, with its coulter-brake, imperially engaged

in the fertile crossing of the incendiary and mellifluous Saqqara… !”

 

Ode to Wood, or Song to the Mu Element

There was mu, the wood of the eye ;

there was the wood of the sternum, there was the wood of

the spinal column, there was mu, the wood of the nose ;

there was mu, the wood of the heel ;

there was the wood of the mouth,

there was the wood of the rim-like forehead,

there was mu, the wood of the thigh ;

there was mu, the wood of the tongue ;

there was the violin-mu, the wood of the glottis ;

there was the wood of the raped

cave, there was the wood of the bride-fir tree,

there was mu, the wood of the cross ;

there was mu, the wood of the stag ;

there was the wood of the eagle, there was the wood of

the axe-scaled carp, next to mu, the wood of the thought :

why have you lost the Wood, why have you banished

Mu, splitting your wedding, dear

leading-tetradic-primordial elements,

beloved Water, psychi-mu–Air, dear Fire,

and you, night overtaken Earth… ?!?

 

 

At the Border of My Village…

At the border of my village with bones of snow

there lies Grandma Floria’s grave… The brightest star

fell into the abyss when they laid the claybed for her…

“Grandma Floria, I’d like to build you an obelisk

out of Swedish granite but I haven’t got so much money… !

I’d like to carve you a marble sun as large as the sky

but I’ve got neither the stone nor the chisel… !

I’ve sculpted a black river stone into a swan,

I’ve raised a monastery of words for you, immuring my shadow,

its spires thrusting into the Greater Bear’s heart… !”

 

The shadows of the spires – over the valley with sweet violets

and the everlasting rainbow… !

 

My village has got more and more bones of snow

and defies the seasons…

 

English version by Gabriela PACHIA