Adrian CIUBOTARU

THE ELIXIRS OF WOMEN

An anonymous letter
death is like an anonymous letter:
I wanted to look:
I don’t find any synonym for reading:
I’m a lot like my fellow men:
a bit anesthetized by elixirs:
yesterday it was nothing:
a word swallowing everything else:
I write with a purified jet
of vitamins
and other nutritive substances:
I proclaim a thesis not my own:
I hang from the third line
just as the third line hangs from something:
miraculous empty transcendence:
the absolute peg:
when another metaphor won’t come
(what other metaphor?)
it’s also good for hanging a pair of trousers
with their stained seat of despair:
death is like a swarm of white butterflies
but nobody sees it this way:
it’s the lowliest reptile
that has arisen:
death is many things at once:
the most beautiful truism:
a white polyptich of crumpled paper
like quotation
from a poetics
of love:

The watchmaker
Death is a stained-glass window through which passersby can be seen.
From above, from somewhere at a gothic height, at the lofty pole of an alp which a woman has installed on a piano, there’s a mosaic of colors. Like a Chinese box where you pick out a color but then see another, smaller one, a hierarchy of watch hands. From above, from very high above, from the hyena’s eye, a furious yelp descends over the world, and more than anything else the sky seems a dirigible that burns up, then returns in the box.
Tick-tock, tick-tock, my hands are transformed into a bowl of warm porous earth where an archer’s bow germinates. Impossible and noematic, it reminds us of a short story with frost-bitten creatures and of a mouth crammed full of the minotaur’s livery.
And as to me, I gnaw a first-aid kit of lead and think of breath divided into two parts: the exact time and the inexact. Under my feet: corpses of goats that tell fortunes. Five iambic times, death flows between the fingers like a melted piece of lard, and in my ears the grunt of the millennial pig persists. From a gothic height, a fang drops on me and smashes to the pavement.
Along the edges of the windows, in their initiating breach, saints reveal to me gray tongues soft as a seal.
I open the box and the drone of the barrel organ stops.
Hoof beats hang from my optic nerve, and a man asks whether the Piano-Woman happens to be at home: (…)