Vasile Gârneţ

and we used to wait
listening to the silence exhale
one of us would glance aslant
(not possessing ubiquitous vision)
to understand whether we thought alike
in the eyes of the world we seemed a team
but that was a perverse way of putting it
with a bitter patina
like a mould blooming
on a window jamb in the shadow

in fact we used to wander through cultivated gardens
in search of nuances
chryophytes – as Galgoţiu would say

someone (a plesiosaurus of the time)
looked on us with indulgence
“like bottles of fine wine
placed in ice buckets, that’s what you are”
he would say attempting a simile
and in our path he would set up
gleaming bamboo boundary posts
so that we could examine our charisma

we noticed other signs too
but we would recite in turn from the law of the pendulum clock
in that way it reined in our philanthropic élan
we would describe the naivety of birds
we would dream in a slightly fauvist way
we would transgress antinomies
Pia would say for example:
“tomorrow is miners’ day”
each understood as much as he understood
from those words
and we would walk…
a wind blew in our faces
we would find a book and read:
“you are now heading toward a different sentiment
let me see you knocking together some backdrops”
it said enigmatically

Translated by Alistair Ian Blyth