RUNNING WATER

The following two poems are part of a literary odyssey that has been running alongside my swerving life-path, at a rather troublesome time.

RUNNING WATER*

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*HAS NO MEMORY

NB. This poem is dedicated to the Dâmboviţa River, our Romanian Thames

I am no longer trickling up the wall!

Seeping in the dark, bubbling in the sun,

I am still striving to fill up my course.

So I keep running with no solid memory on my shores

except for a faint foreignizing whistleblow.

Within immemorial distance from my source

I am confined to leaking through the pipelines

where I unravel my feelings up to bursting point. 

Letting these loose, I solidify into hopes, and rage, and remorse

but never regret my aching ripples.

(Having no body I cherish the traces of pain

Inflicted upon my reflection at which I smile so often.)

I wish now I were a drop in this quivering turbid pond!

At least its borders recall how grassy roots used to tickle its insole

while my waves travel constantly to their underneath repose.

How can I grow old when I have no regrets?

Still there is memory in the great outside

(I believe in my heart that roots may still breathe

from underneath a concrete layer). So here I am:

my face a blank stare colored with clouds and creased by sparrows,

blushing at sunset and turning purple with the stars,

floating ever so stealthily and filled with resilience

in my watery bed.

Fishermen love me for the silvery cues I provide

and sing to me daily whirring their rods with knotty fingers

while I undo my wishbones.

As the noon sinks its rays vertically into my chest

I feel like leaping towards the riverbanks to unfurl 

mermaid-like tresses for the occasional pedestrian.

I am most resigned by early morning, when ink-blue shades

dip their mysteries into my foam. 

Then I receive any stranger coyly, with a smug assent. 

I could spell the names of all those whose image I embraced,

were I not sworn to silence by my own

monolithic passage.

I don’t overindulge in personal thoughts

(these here express a mere fad once upon an afternoon)

So I wish you well, my enemy’s children,

and may you delight

in my restlessness forevermore!

Your sweet-watered foe

Published in The Grove literary magazine, in 2013 (back cover)

HOW MY RUNNING BEGAN

One missing figment of the old patchwork

is the sprawling walnut tree in my grandparents’ courtyard

(a smell of moist soil and iodine is forever attached in my mind

 to the barking of their yellow anemone-like dog).

This great old bark which could transport me to the stars

was once beheaded and laid thundering upon the tiles

(the night before, its lamed trunk had groaned so

for one final embrace in the moonlight).

Even now I still yearn – running – for thin green palms

extending their bounty to us one last autumn.

Since then my soil was regularly uprooted

and the doors of childhood unhinged.

There were always cracks and bursts eating at the walls

yet I never left the rustling premises

(like a brown leaf stuck to the eaves)

and my grief kept dripping into Poplars’ Well.

Thus I survived through adolescence,

eating away at remaining splinters,

until I found an outlet (burrowed perhaps by the above-mentioned dog

in times immemorial) through which I funnelled

ever so ravenously, feeling for the light.

Published in Contemporary Literary Horizon, 2013.