Translated from the Romanian by Adam J. Sorkin with the poet
In the former City of the Crown--Kronstadt--Stadt Kronn--Stalin City, heavy salvers and clasps with aristocratic coats of arms and symbols of fecundity power faith-- masked among a hodgepodge of cast-iron kettles broken pots rusty locks empty frames candles toothless clocks with coy nymphs on their faces old things crammed helter-skelter in the same shop window so as to lose all vestiges (an hourglass in the muzzle of a dog sleeping under a thick coverlet of dust)--for sale for a handful of coins in a world altogether, absolutely new.
History refracted through the young parents' being.
The clock in the Kremlin, toothless too, would strike as a sign that a mistake had been made: oh, the mistakes of "the working class" do not have to be stared at straight in the eye. At night, in secret, guards and bulldozers surrounded "The Father," at night a tractor pulled to the ground his massive trunk with the military cap on his head. His stiff arm that had been extended everywhere throughout the country struck the earth. Drops of poison in everyone's bones had descended from father to son, from leaves to the ground.
Master of the Mountains
"Don't say anything in anyone's presence. Don't talk when the child might hear," my mother whispered. "Don't speak at all. You never know what might happen. And leave those things be, because who knows what can happen to you for no reason as it has to others . . . just for listening to some idle chatter . . . " But in the evening when my father began searching for broadcasts and the short waves shrilled (in the air catastrophe was shattering the world, heart-stopping cascades), mother was ready to approach nearer, her knitting in her lap, waiting.
Father was Master of the Mountains. He was the strongest. He was free in all his ways, harmonious. And he was able to laugh with all his being. He was still able to laugh on the tattered edge of sadness and astonishment.
Alarm gathered between parentheses. Questions about evil ransomed by his healing voice.
Everybody trusted him. Not even the nastiest dogs would approach him to bite. His speech could measure the most fitting distance for everything in the world. The first Tamer must have resembled my father.
I do not know how much others were able to learn from his knowledge, but he worked hard with very little help for all animal-kind throughout whole villages, all the sheepfolds and farms and food factories. He looked after the cattle at so many households, each domestic animal that was like a close relative in a diminished family--the mute sustaining god.
Father was master over all this--always he'd come back from his work smiling, always with the scent of distance in his hair, in his clothes, on his face.
In the afternoon he drank his coffee: was it the same coffee filling that cup that had been dipped in silver like a petal? I'd stay nearby. I could breathe in the delicate steam-- and later on I'd tell Father where the hands of the kitchen clock had reached, the clock as old and big as the clock in the railroad station.