*

“Except for a stone, no one is innocent.”
(Hegel)

The wolf will meet his end, the forest whispers to me
as I pass through the junipers.
A thousand visions of the North have I had,
but I, Row, the blind man, did not return. Lightning
does not toy with you, its flame does not break open stones,
oh Lord, I cannot be saved from their violet folly.
Today above the Stones of the North there was
no raven,
no vulture,
no crane.
Among the insects, clays and wild beasts, among the leaf stalks
of the lecherous weeds and the strawberry plant runners
was debauchery without sex:
skin upon skin, bark upon bark, carapace upon carapace,
scale upon scale, tooth upon tooth.
Today above this sleet a black eye arose:
it hung over the pines, fixed in space, a bachelor of death.
The sun did not make it blink,
its shadow did not fall over all things and living creatures.
At noon it threw itself upon the necks of the roe deer,
it had claws with which it choked the martens in the undergrowth,
it plunged into the river waters and caught fish, with its beak
it pecked the stones and scattered the sand beneath their skins
into the wind.
“It is not an eye,” Row, the blind man, told me.
“It is a letter from an unfinished poem
which set forth to hunt for the other lean ones.
In the unfinished poems the letters turn vengeful:
the lean devour the fat, the wet
guzzle down the dry, the singed set on fire
the green and unripe…”

I know: a thousand visions I had
inside us are both the finished poem and the unfinished one
inside us are the raven on the Stones of the North
and the dust on the stones of the road
inside us is the eye that knows to distinguish
sick, sour letters from letters suckled on the truth
of our nights
as only the wolves’ eyes know when the forest dies.

http://cordite.org.au/translations/sorkin-iacob-vulturescu/
http://levurelitteraire.com/george-vulturescu/