Tomorrow, around this time
I sit in the smoke-filled kitchen
and smoke and cough and sniff
(you wouldn’t want to hear me now)
I read your book again and my thoughts fume
and I don’t know when I’ll see you again
When you picked me up in the taxi
I was nothing but cold-filled bones
I kept an obstinate silence,
we drove along the boulevards,
I had no idea where I was
and clenched your fingers to the bone
and night descended from the frozen sky
“don’t bite my wrist,”
you said,
“that’s the death spot”
you held bundled to your chest a shawl and three flowers
the taxi had long since left
midnight had dissipated among the beers
and mulled wine and ashtrays
and we were surer and surer we were going to die
we couldn’t have much longer to live
and you said “let us go somewhere nice,
find something clean,
a warm room,
so that Lady Death won’t take us straight from the tavern,
so that we can dress ourselves in something more suitable,
so that we can caress each other for a little.&rdquo
night thoughts of a melancholic mind
lighting the next cigarette from the last
a corpse in a smoke-filled kitchen
three metres off the ground
between concrete walls
I wonder whether you’re asleep – you’re like a mole,
I don’t know what you do all day,
and at night, when I hold you in my arms, you dig tunnels—
and you tell me:
if not even now will it work,
if not even we will be able to live together
then to hell with life
and love along with it.
Translation: Alistair Ian Blyth
To access Marin Mălaicu-Hondrari’s author page click HERE.