Longings
Poems
Music
The gray-haired prince
Engrossed in music
Dreams and sees
How I dance a dance of life.
Seven veils fall off me;
I step on them
And, naked,
I dance a Bacchus-twisted dance.
Sounds are
Babbling brooks,
Sea in tempest,
Whipping wind,
Rustling of drying leaves,
Echo of steps walking over the fall leaves.
In dreams my prince sees
How he and I,
Bewitched by the music’s cry,
Walk on sharp crystals,
Blood on bare feet.
We sing in unison with sounds of a ringing glass,
And move in a circling dance,
On an ice
As easy to break
As life.
(page 28, Longings, 2022)
I Want to Go to Japan
Such a colorful, motley bazaar!
Gray-green serious eyes…
“I want to go to Japan,” he said.
“But why?” she asked.
“It is honest and clean.”
“What’s there?”
“Love.”
Bodies interwoven in embrace…
“And then?”
“I want to go to Japan.
It is honest and clean.
My love will vanish then;
My desire will die.”
She got up and left,
And he remained alone.
(page 64, Longings, 2022)
Lazy Feelings
“It would be nice…”
Just the thought…
“Why bother?!”
How nice to live enjoying
The buzzing fuss of everyday life!
How nice to spend a day away from work,
Stepping with my horse
On vein-roots of ever-green trees
at twilight!
How nice to play with a child once a month
In the square by the Sevres Babylone,
Fizzing with bored mothers’ talks.
How nice to go with a child for a long walk
In the bois de Boulogne
Slipping over the roses’ petals
Covering the soil.
How nice to live without love,
Only sometimes to meet the one
Who would ignite the heart a bit,
Like a memory of fire that once made it hot!
How nice to escape from flames of the ignited heart,
To do it fast and on time.
How nice to run toward the new
Which has no fire,52
A still lake in the middle of nowhere,
Whose translucent swampy waters call,
Promising the quiet and no pain.
Is it an escape,
When feelings are lazy,
And we want to believe this is a wisdom,
A colorless glass filled with the juice lacking taste,
That keeps us away
From swimming in the raging waters of a lake?
(pages 51-52, Longings, 2022)
Painting
Such an interesting work of art! He was standing in the Metropolitan Museum of Art peering into a painting. Does he really think it is interesting? Probably not. No, no, it is good… but boring, strikingly boring! Why does he want to think that it is interesting?
This is his third time in front of this work of art, Courbet’s dark-haired shepherdess sitting in the middle of the blooming summer field. The first time they met by this painting, he came here to please her, because she said it was her favorite work of art. He arrived early and he first saw the painting and only later noticed her. After he looked at her, he looked at the painting again. She and the painting seemed alike. They both possessed the beauty of an ever-green forest, broken by an unexpected appearance of prairie fields softly colored in yellow and violet, illuminated by a melancholic summer sun, but neither were thunder-striking.
The second time, they met in front of this painting again. To him the painting looked the same: it was pure and beautiful. But she… She was not beautiful. She was striking… Through her pale face and deep innocent eyes, he peered into her hidden well, her I, and it seemed vibrant as drops of a warm spring rain ready to slightly touch with a dandelion kiss the lips of the motley world – tender as a clawless green-eyed cat he played with when he was five years old and passionate as Cleopatra ready to wrap her thin freckled arms around Anthony’s fat-ox neck. He could not take his eyes off her pale face. He was mesmerized by the irises of her eyes, the color of which appeared at moments to be a deep pine-needle green and brown like soil after the hot short rain, or yellow like a face of a sick girl recovering from exhausting her body through consumption. To him, the painting suddenly appeared deep and innocent as her eyes.
The third time, he came alone and stood for a long time in front of the painting. He wanted to see through the painting her pale blue-eyed face and her unfathomably infinite soul. But
(pages 28-29, Longings, 2022)