From „With face to cross” (1994)

***
If you’re tired of reading just go home.
It’s late and you haven’t yet bought meat and bread and vegetables
or tears for the existential dressings.
How false the day is when it ends as if it had been something other
than a chapel where you forgot to take off your hat
and someone pulled you discreetly aside
“Mr., please, you know. . .!”

The false day, lived as if by another
more stupid, more lazy than you
who has usurped your name, your body, your feelings.

Translated by Camelia and Andreea Luncan (with suggestions in English by Luci Shaw and Jeanne Murray Walker)

***
At the edge of the world
called neighborhood a petal
is crying for water
a kid has lost his cap
the future stopped working
somewhere between
tomorrow and the rest of them.

***
On the expecting sidewalk
the garland of the cross is growing
you pick it up and slowly
it becomes all that you have
and you don’t understand
how come so suddenly
the sky has cleared.

***
Without knowing I crossed over an angel tonight
my shoulders are white and soft
with his wings. Tonight I’m another
and the palm of the cross drops a tear
on everything. And all the things walk slowly,
and are almost talking to one another.

***

Look the temptations are marching
through the capital of my sight
they are enticing, so alive and so transparent that
you could almost see through them
prince atom beheading the poems.

***
And it’s like I put on a new
conselation each morning
when I go to take the tram
tugging at my shirt
as if it were a vision of heaven.

Translated by Andreea Luncan