Svetlana Cârstean
translated by Anca Bărbulescu
Insomnia
I sit astride
the place between yesterday and tomorrow,
on this mare that doesn’t belong
to me, I’m not the one grooming it
and I’m not the one feeding it.
She is alien to me,
she’s not from this town
and we have no common memories,
but she keeps me by force on her back,
the back of the night that has passed
and of the day that’s none too eager to come.
The dream spat me out
forcibly
hatefully
like the stone of a fruit
like an unwanted child.
So I’ve ended up on this shiny back
on which I slip
like on muck,
but without falling.
The night clings to me,
it’s a breeze with small teeth,
it sinks them into my skin and stays there.
The pain is not great, just continuous.
The heels do not yet sting the concrete,
the trams do not cleave the air into cold slices,
the deeds of tomorrow are still ripening,
they sit covered with large sheets of cloth
like uninaugurated exhibitions.
At night, the salami is taken off the shelf
and put in a secret place.
The world and its salamis move somewhere else
at night.
Same with the cakes, which are my soul.
I, too, should be somewhere else
– the body an empty carcass
a shelf emptied in the evening
a recipient that no one
absolutely no one
wants to steal.
but the dream spat me outwards.
I am here.
Between the day that has been and the one yet to come.
The dream spat me out
like the hard, bitter stone of a fruit.
I let it be.
It was a bad dream.
Or I was the bad one.
between yesterday and tomorrow there’s a narrow space
like the one between the closet and the wall.
I sit with my back
to yesterday’s sun,
to yesterday’s fear,
and with my face to something that does not yet want to open up.
On the same mucky skin until
the trams, the high heels, the workers receive their signal
and start up.
6 in the Morning
Good morning, workers!
The sirens call you. Your hurried steps resound through the cold moisture of the morning. The chill reminds you that you are strong, which is why you don’t even feel like standing up to it. Your lax bodies, filled with the irreplaceable heat of the bed, of the wife, your bodies move forward at will. How I would have wanted to say that you fall like dewdrops on the flowers! Would that be exaggerated?
When you enter your factories – a worker can only stay in the factory, that is his place –, you gradually regain your weight. The first gestures that reencounter the lathe, the borer, the work bench, all the gestures are still full of sleeplessness, like the one during the night: in a very short moment of wakefulness, no longer knowing which side you’re on, you start to fumble around with your hands, blindly, until you find your wife and fall asleep again, in a hurry not to lose the continuity.
Here before the work bench, you are no longer allowed to fall asleep. Here you become heavier and heavier.
Good morning, workers!
The peasants have gotten ahead of you. The peasant has gone out onto the field a long time ago to prepare the spring tilling.
What the Worker Tells
I only went with my grip vice flower.
The wicked are separated from the good.
The punishment is great and the wicked shoemaker will have his boottree taken from him.
The wicked lathe hand will have his lathe taken from him.
The wicked gardener will have his hoe taken from him.
And they will all have their protection equipment taken from them.
For me, since I seem to have been more good than wicked, God has built a light little house, suspended among the multitude of bright little houses, hung in a row in perfect order, like laundry hung up to dry, or rather like swallows on the learn-to-count wires in the kindergarten.
My grip vice and I were going to sit there quietly and happily, no one knows for how long nor did it matter. This happiness was advancing towards me threateningly and I already knew I couldn’t endure nor finish it.
After a while, doubt and impatience ate at me more and more. I considered myself a slave, rather than happy. Every moment I wanted to give up.
I had grown estranged even from my grip vice which awaited me alone and as always consoled in a corner of our suspended little home with endless windows.
Just as I was on the brink of despair, God looked upon me gently.
He took pity on me and His hands, slender and fragile, but coloured in thousands of colours like flower petals, showed me the way back.
Then everything disappeared. The workshop received me, lukewarm as always.
God still looked upon me so gently that I felt nothing on arrival.
Calling
(What Oblomov Sometimes Hears)
Come back from the waters!
Leave your bed and forget its misleading warmth. Come outside with me! In front of your house awaits the most beautiful gift you’ve ever received. A whole garden for you to tend to.
You, who have forgotten the look and smell of flowers. You need a rare, priceless flower.
Rarer than the edelweiss you received one summer.
You were riding the train, on holiday. You were already a good child. The pride of your parents. But you were getting bored without even realising it. The forest ranger on the bench in front of you took off his little green hat and removed from it the flower, which he handed to you.
You looked at it in amazement. It was so small and you couldn’t tell what colour it was. Its fluff gave you a shiver that you did not want to pay heed to.
One could say you were glad when you received it. Feeling its power and its certainty, you thought nothing can touch it, nothing can crush it and you planted it again in your herbarium. Between others: dried and pale, exhausted.
Remember now.
Your clean, tidy herbarium that got you the best grade in nature science.
Your herbarium full of moods, each the same as the other. Only one mood, in fact, long polished to perfection: the look of flowers after death. Cold, yellow, with labels.
Forget, I tell you, your bed decorated with large and heavy pillows! Forget the lace-edged sheets covering you, wrapping you, making you feel protected.
Just get up, open the door as if you haven’t done it in a long time and I promise you will see something new. Forget about the edelweiss as well, I’ll give you another with a much more velvety and luminous skin. It is alive and in spring it breathes deeply. It alone knows how to breathe like that. The air moves around freely, like a small, spry lamb left to romp between its delicate, but strong tissues. It roams between its petals, stirring in whirlwinds its seeds spread by the thousand, here and there.
You will see it budding and you will burn with eagerness to see it open up and budding again. Do not wait for it to die, not even in your mind, for it never will.
Challenge it, caress it, go insane because of it.
You are merciless,
cruel,
again you will be my grip vice flower
in thousands of colours.
Grip vice
coloured white,
red,
blue,
violet,
always green.
Open the door and receive as a gift the garden which my own two hands have planted, tended, watered, waited to grow, to bear fruit. Not one, countless grip vices sprouting haughtily on an endless lawn.
A giant work bench.
Layers of grip vices begging for your endless love.
If you won’t do it today, then maybe tomorrow. They have great patience.
Stand in the doorway and look, at least from there, upon your garden so fresh,
innocent, a whole world of buds, entirely yours.
My beloved,
a grip vice tightened
inescapably
around me,
fluttering your petals,
like all too patient
wings.
*
On the green lawn of the work bench this flower of bright green blooms.
It will humiliate you and whip you mercilessly, for hours on end, until you see it crumbling you with its olive-dark body, almost shiny, tempting, round and very ripe.
Who was I?
I was a lonely little boy who one day had his hair plaited into pigtails and blue bows and an elastic headband put on his head. His ears were red and painful from the elastic squeezing his head strongly and from the punishments meted out by his father. He would rub his ears between his thumb and his index finger the way you rub a dry peppermint or basil leaf or a rose petal to turn it into powder and keep it in a small brown paper bag. The ears burn, they turn red like two rose petals and my little boy hears well, better and better, too well, things far away. His hearing turns into a tunnel in which sounds and pain are one and they roll like heavy leaden balls. I was a little boy who one day started to grow breasts.
And today the little boy has to write an essay. His hands smell of plasticine, they have big ink stains along the thin bones sheathed in transparent skin, his soul shrinks more and more, it ends up the size of a poppy seed, then rolls with difficulty all the way to the feet of the teacher, idly tapping a rhythm in the unknown darkness under the teacher’s desk. There it begs for mercy. It shouts for help.
This essay I cannot write. I can, however, give you the news: since this morning my breasts are growing.
With Nails Unpainted
In those days
Little girls had to be good,
Which meant being little boys
Who did not wish to paint their nails,
Nor to dress their dolls in different clothes every time
And who weren’t so dumb as to be the mother
When they played house.
And the boys were good,
Which means they were like little girls,
They were staying close to their mothers
Not running far away,
And in that game they were neither the mother nor the father,
They were always the children.
On this playground,
In summer, they lined up nicely
The little girls with their nails unpainted
And the little boys ceaselessly pushing
The little plastic cars round and round
Their
Mothers,
Never further.
They lined up and each
Got their prizes.
The little girls like boys,
The boys like the little girls.
Always different.
*
And do you know what will happen when my unpainted nails chip and turn black? I will feel a common sort of worry for the wellbeing of my body and for a while I will look after my nails, first I will cut them really short, so no white shows, so that I can feel the change, so that I can feel myself healing. Then I will let them grow nicely and for a while colour them in all sorts of shades and look at them often and show them to others. I will be an organized, collected lady, who uses makeup remover twice a day, drinks still water, hides her slightly sagging breasts in impeccable bras and takes small, even, but firm steps to the taxi awaiting her. But it will not last long. With me the time of painted nails never lasts long.
My mother’s nails were almost always beautiful. And because she didn’t have the courage to hit me with her hand directly, she would punish me with her nails. Before I even felt the pain in the bright summer mornings, I just heard her voice and saw her nails flying, shining through the air.
My mother had long hair, flowing in the wind, shiny purses, short skirts and smelled of cucumber extract makeup remover. I was a thin, bloodcoloured strip.
Do you think my nicely painted nails could do harm some day?
One
For a while sleep entered through the same gate,
in me and in her,
through the same gate there entered joy,
fear,
taste, smell, the softness of cherries.
My weight was her weight,
my nails, her nails,
my air, her air,
we both dreamed the same dream,
we were one:
a woman wandering
alone
on the streets, by train, by bus.
Two
I think of my big, pregnant-woman belly. On it I rested my hands, with it I pushed people in trams, making room for myself, piercing the air, it felt as though I was stronger than it or maybe it was resigned and elastic. I think of my mother’s belly, that I’ve never seen, not even in a picture. Her belly, with me in her, remains an eternal secret. And when I remember them, my belly and her belly become two identical, shady rooms, with the blinds pulled down, where you can sleep late. Two rooms where you know every stain on the ceiling, every little granule in the whitewash, every drawing projected by the thin strips of light along the furniture, and the walls and over your body. And it’s like in a dream. You move freely in a room, but at the same time you see the one next door too,
you can pass from one to the other without opening doors, without closing windows behind you.
My mother in my arms, I cross the alley running. A toy alley. An alley that will soon be coloured.
She lies nestled against my chest, I can’t even hear her breath. With her eyes she asks me not to let her go, not to drop her on the sidewalk among the odds and ends that everyone tramples.
I should say she’s light.
But no, in fact, she is very heavy, she makes me curb my back, she breaks my arms.
I should say she’s small. But she is large, white and round. Her soft bottom, overflowing and imperturbable, is stuck to my ribs, making my skin feel hot.
My mother lies flush against me. My body shrivels in a moment, I grow suddenly old when I see her bland, scentless skin.
She’s white, she’s large. She’s on top of me.
She’s the moon that has descended in my arms.
She is cold, but I’m sweating.
I’m looking at my mother. Who am I?
My mother doesn’t sweat.
And she pees noiselessly. For dozens of years she’s refused to hear her pee falling on the spotless porcelain of the toilet. First she turns on the water, in the sink, the water flows strongly, nervously, sprinkling everything around, but it covers any other sound in the room. A mean, but clean, crystalline, odourless water.
Her scent is my scent. I come from behind with my armpits stuck, closed on the inside, locked, so I’m not recognised. The soul hidden in my armpits is unbearable, it reeks. My mother can’t even look at it. She sends me straight into the bathroom.
I am good and I turn on the tap, as far as it goes. A whole sink, brimful with water, here is the only true gift I can make her. Of late, she can’t even stand hearing others pee.
Afterwards I pull the toilet’s metal chain. Our hearing is again invaded by the noisy water that cleans and mingles smells, colours, that invents rainbows on the porcelain and carries them on, to where not our noses, nor our eyes nor our lips can reach, to where our leftovers move freely and unknown by anyone, meeting
another darkness, other tubes, other recipients, other voices, other rooms. Without skin nor bones nor thoughts.
Who I am
I look at men and wonder who I am.
Gone are the old times when my grandfather would put on his boots and leap over the large puddles on the village street with me on his back, on the way to the kindergarten.
Gone, most of all, are those times when I had bad dreams every night, and my father would come in my bed and put a hand over my stomach so I’d settle down and stay that way until I fell asleep. Or I would even wake up with him by my side in the morning.
Gone, too, are the times when my father washed me from head to toe, gone is the time of my first visit to the gynaecologist, where I also went with him.
Gone are the years when I studied with him the yew, the spruce, the pine and the fir.
Are they gone for good, I wonder?
*
I am a woman,
my body has been floating for so long,
over the far-stretching waters, white like moonlight,
shameless and silent moonlight.
I am a merciless mother.
who hugs her child,
to the point of suffocation,
who makes it one with her again,
like in the old days,
when the big bellies were shady rooms for rest,
they were the good rooms with windows on the street,
the rooms of eternal holiday,
without pain, without tears,
they were that place where no one parts with anyone.
I am a woman, often ugly,
yesterday my body was a paper boat
I threw it on the surface of this water like in a game,
hoping it would carry me far away.
Today I am the killer whale,
19
often beautiful,
waiting for her fisherman.
Svetlana Cârstean, born in 1969 in Botoșani, debuted in 1995, in the collective volume Tablou de familie (Family Portrait) with the poem “Floarea de menghină” (The Vise Flower), which would also give the name of her first individual poetry book, in 2008, a few poems of which have already been translated into French. Over the years, she published articles, interviews, and poems in Romanian publications such as Dilema, Observator Cultural or România Literară.
translated by Anca Bărbulescu
Insomnia
I sit astride
the place between yesterday and tomorrow,
on this mare that doesn’t belong
to me, I’m not the one grooming it
and I’m not the one feeding it.
She is alien to me,
she’s not from this town
and we have no common memories,
but she keeps me by force on her back,
the back of the night that has passed
and of the day that’s none too eager to come.
The dream spat me out
forcibly
hatefully
like the stone of a fruit
like an unwanted child.
So I’ve ended up on this shiny back
on which I slip
like on muck,
but without falling.
The night clings to me,
it’s a breeze with small teeth,
it sinks them into my skin and stays there.
The pain is not great, just continuous.
The heels do not yet sting the concrete,
the trams do not cleave the air into cold slices,
the deeds of tomorrow are still ripening,
they sit covered with large sheets of cloth
like uninaugurated exhibitions.
At night, the salami is taken off the shelf
and put in a secret place.
The world and its salamis move somewhere else
at night.
Same with the cakes, which are my soul.
I, too, should be somewhere else
– the body an empty carcass
a shelf emptied in the evening
a recipient that no one
absolutely no one
wants to steal.
but the dream spat me outwards.
I am here.
Between the day that has been and the one yet to come.
The dream spat me out
like the hard, bitter stone of a fruit.
I let it be.
It was a bad dream.
Or I was the bad one.
between yesterday and tomorrow there’s a narrow space
like the one between the closet and the wall.
I sit with my back
to yesterday’s sun,
to yesterday’s fear,
and with my face to something that does not yet want to open up.
On the same mucky skin until
the trams, the high heels, the workers receive their signal
and start up.
6 in the Morning
Good morning, workers!
The sirens call you. Your hurried steps resound through the cold moisture of the morning. The chill reminds you that you are strong, which is why you don’t even feel like standing up to it. Your lax bodies, filled with the irreplaceable heat of the bed, of the wife, your bodies move forward at will. How I would have wanted to say that you fall like dewdrops on the flowers! Would that be exaggerated?
When you enter your factories – a worker can only stay in the factory, that is his place –, you gradually regain your weight. The first gestures that reencounter the lathe, the borer, the work bench, all the gestures are still full of sleeplessness, like the one during the night: in a very short moment of wakefulness, no longer knowing which side you’re on, you start to fumble around with your hands, blindly, until you find your wife and fall asleep again, in a hurry not to lose the continuity.
Here before the work bench, you are no longer allowed to fall asleep. Here you become heavier and heavier.
Good morning, workers!
The peasants have gotten ahead of you. The peasant has gone out onto the field a long time ago to prepare the spring tilling.
What the Worker Tells
I only went with my grip vice flower.
The wicked are separated from the good.
The punishment is great and the wicked shoemaker will have his boottree taken from him.
The wicked lathe hand will have his lathe taken from him.
The wicked gardener will have his hoe taken from him.
And they will all have their protection equipment taken from them.
For me, since I seem to have been more good than wicked, God has built a light little house, suspended among the multitude of bright little houses, hung in a row in perfect order, like laundry hung up to dry, or rather like swallows on the learn-to-count wires in the kindergarten.
My grip vice and I were going to sit there quietly and happily, no one knows for how long nor did it matter. This happiness was advancing towards me threateningly and I already knew I couldn’t endure nor finish it.
After a while, doubt and impatience ate at me more and more. I considered myself a slave, rather than happy. Every moment I wanted to give up.
I had grown estranged even from my grip vice which awaited me alone and as always consoled in a corner of our suspended little home with endless windows.
Just as I was on the brink of despair, God looked upon me gently.
He took pity on me and His hands, slender and fragile, but coloured in thousands of colours like flower petals, showed me the way back.
Then everything disappeared. The workshop received me, lukewarm as always.
God still looked upon me so gently that I felt nothing on arrival.
Calling
(What Oblomov Sometimes Hears)
Come back from the waters!
Leave your bed and forget its misleading warmth. Come outside with me! In front of your house awaits the most beautiful gift you’ve ever received. A whole garden for you to tend to.
You, who have forgotten the look and smell of flowers. You need a rare, priceless flower.
Rarer than the edelweiss you received one summer.
You were riding the train, on holiday. You were already a good child. The pride of your parents. But you were getting bored without even realising it. The forest ranger on the bench in front of you took off his little green hat and removed from it the flower, which he handed to you.
You looked at it in amazement. It was so small and you couldn’t tell what colour it was. Its fluff gave you a shiver that you did not want to pay heed to.
One could say you were glad when you received it. Feeling its power and its certainty, you thought nothing can touch it, nothing can crush it and you planted it again in your herbarium. Between others: dried and pale, exhausted.
Remember now.
Your clean, tidy herbarium that got you the best grade in nature science.
Your herbarium full of moods, each the same as the other. Only one mood, in fact, long polished to perfection: the look of flowers after death. Cold, yellow, with labels.
Forget, I tell you, your bed decorated with large and heavy pillows! Forget the lace-edged sheets covering you, wrapping you, making you feel protected.
Just get up, open the door as if you haven’t done it in a long time and I promise you will see something new. Forget about the edelweiss as well, I’ll give you another with a much more velvety and luminous skin. It is alive and in spring it breathes deeply. It alone knows how to breathe like that. The air moves around freely, like a small, spry lamb left to romp between its delicate, but strong tissues. It roams between its petals, stirring in whirlwinds its seeds spread by the thousand, here and there.
You will see it budding and you will burn with eagerness to see it open up and budding again. Do not wait for it to die, not even in your mind, for it never will.
Challenge it, caress it, go insane because of it.
You are merciless,
cruel,
again you will be my grip vice flower
in thousands of colours.
Grip vice
coloured white,
red,
blue,
violet,
always green.
Open the door and receive as a gift the garden which my own two hands have planted, tended, watered, waited to grow, to bear fruit. Not one, countless grip vices sprouting haughtily on an endless lawn.
A giant work bench.
Layers of grip vices begging for your endless love.
If you won’t do it today, then maybe tomorrow. They have great patience.
Stand in the doorway and look, at least from there, upon your garden so fresh,
innocent, a whole world of buds, entirely yours.
My beloved,
a grip vice tightened
inescapably
around me,
fluttering your petals,
like all too patient
wings.
*
On the green lawn of the work bench this flower of bright green blooms.
It will humiliate you and whip you mercilessly, for hours on end, until you see it crumbling you with its olive-dark body, almost shiny, tempting, round and very ripe.
Who was I?
I was a lonely little boy who one day had his hair plaited into pigtails and blue bows and an elastic headband put on his head. His ears were red and painful from the elastic squeezing his head strongly and from the punishments meted out by his father. He would rub his ears between his thumb and his index finger the way you rub a dry peppermint or basil leaf or a rose petal to turn it into powder and keep it in a small brown paper bag. The ears burn, they turn red like two rose petals and my little boy hears well, better and better, too well, things far away. His hearing turns into a tunnel in which sounds and pain are one and they roll like heavy leaden balls. I was a little boy who one day started to grow breasts.
And today the little boy has to write an essay. His hands smell of plasticine, they have big ink stains along the thin bones sheathed in transparent skin, his soul shrinks more and more, it ends up the size of a poppy seed, then rolls with difficulty all the way to the feet of the teacher, idly tapping a rhythm in the unknown darkness under the teacher’s desk. There it begs for mercy. It shouts for help.
This essay I cannot write. I can, however, give you the news: since this morning my breasts are growing.
With Nails Unpainted
In those days
Little girls had to be good,
Which meant being little boys
Who did not wish to paint their nails,
Nor to dress their dolls in different clothes every time
And who weren’t so dumb as to be the mother
When they played house.
And the boys were good,
Which means they were like little girls,
They were staying close to their mothers
Not running far away,
And in that game they were neither the mother nor the father,
They were always the children.
On this playground,
In summer, they lined up nicely
The little girls with their nails unpainted
And the little boys ceaselessly pushing
The little plastic cars round and round
Their
Mothers,
Never further.
They lined up and each
Got their prizes.
The little girls like boys,
The boys like the little girls.
Always different.
*
And do you know what will happen when my unpainted nails chip and turn black? I will feel a common sort of worry for the wellbeing of my body and for a while I will look after my nails, first I will cut them really short, so no white shows, so that I can feel the change, so that I can feel myself healing. Then I will let them grow nicely and for a while colour them in all sorts of shades and look at them often and show them to others. I will be an organized, collected lady, who uses makeup remover twice a day, drinks still water, hides her slightly sagging breasts in impeccable bras and takes small, even, but firm steps to the taxi awaiting her. But it will not last long. With me the time of painted nails never lasts long.
My mother’s nails were almost always beautiful. And because she didn’t have the courage to hit me with her hand directly, she would punish me with her nails. Before I even felt the pain in the bright summer mornings, I just heard her voice and saw her nails flying, shining through the air.
My mother had long hair, flowing in the wind, shiny purses, short skirts and smelled of cucumber extract makeup remover. I was a thin, bloodcoloured strip.
Do you think my nicely painted nails could do harm some day?
One
For a while sleep entered through the same gate,
in me and in her,
through the same gate there entered joy,
fear,
taste, smell, the softness of cherries.
My weight was her weight,
my nails, her nails,
my air, her air,
we both dreamed the same dream,
we were one:
a woman wandering
alone
on the streets, by train, by bus.
Two
I think of my big, pregnant-woman belly. On it I rested my hands, with it I pushed people in trams, making room for myself, piercing the air, it felt as though I was stronger than it or maybe it was resigned and elastic. I think of my mother’s belly, that I’ve never seen, not even in a picture. Her belly, with me in her, remains an eternal secret. And when I remember them, my belly and her belly become two identical, shady rooms, with the blinds pulled down, where you can sleep late. Two rooms where you know every stain on the ceiling, every little granule in the whitewash, every drawing projected by the thin strips of light along the furniture, and the walls and over your body. And it’s like in a dream. You move freely in a room, but at the same time you see the one next door too,
you can pass from one to the other without opening doors, without closing windows behind you.
My mother in my arms, I cross the alley running. A toy alley. An alley that will soon be coloured.
She lies nestled against my chest, I can’t even hear her breath. With her eyes she asks me not to let her go, not to drop her on the sidewalk among the odds and ends that everyone tramples.
I should say she’s light.
But no, in fact, she is very heavy, she makes me curb my back, she breaks my arms.
I should say she’s small. But she is large, white and round. Her soft bottom, overflowing and imperturbable, is stuck to my ribs, making my skin feel hot.
My mother lies flush against me. My body shrivels in a moment, I grow suddenly old when I see her bland, scentless skin.
She’s white, she’s large. She’s on top of me.
She’s the moon that has descended in my arms.
She is cold, but I’m sweating.
I’m looking at my mother. Who am I?
My mother doesn’t sweat.
And she pees noiselessly. For dozens of years she’s refused to hear her pee falling on the spotless porcelain of the toilet. First she turns on the water, in the sink, the water flows strongly, nervously, sprinkling everything around, but it covers any other sound in the room. A mean, but clean, crystalline, odourless water.
Her scent is my scent. I come from behind with my armpits stuck, closed on the inside, locked, so I’m not recognised. The soul hidden in my armpits is unbearable, it reeks. My mother can’t even look at it. She sends me straight into the bathroom.
I am good and I turn on the tap, as far as it goes. A whole sink, brimful with water, here is the only true gift I can make her. Of late, she can’t even stand hearing others pee.
Afterwards I pull the toilet’s metal chain. Our hearing is again invaded by the noisy water that cleans and mingles smells, colours, that invents rainbows on the porcelain and carries them on, to where not our noses, nor our eyes nor our lips can reach, to where our leftovers move freely and unknown by anyone, meeting
another darkness, other tubes, other recipients, other voices, other rooms. Without skin nor bones nor thoughts.
Who I am
I look at men and wonder who I am.
Gone are the old times when my grandfather would put on his boots and leap over the large puddles on the village street with me on his back, on the way to the kindergarten.
Gone, most of all, are those times when I had bad dreams every night, and my father would come in my bed and put a hand over my stomach so I’d settle down and stay that way until I fell asleep. Or I would even wake up with him by my side in the morning.
Gone, too, are the times when my father washed me from head to toe, gone is the time of my first visit to the gynaecologist, where I also went with him.
Gone are the years when I studied with him the yew, the spruce, the pine and the fir.
Are they gone for good, I wonder?
*
I am a woman,
my body has been floating for so long,
over the far-stretching waters, white like moonlight,
shameless and silent moonlight.
I am a merciless mother.
who hugs her child,
to the point of suffocation,
who makes it one with her again,
like in the old days,
when the big bellies were shady rooms for rest,
they were the good rooms with windows on the street,
the rooms of eternal holiday,
without pain, without tears,
they were that place where no one parts with anyone.
I am a woman, often ugly,
yesterday my body was a paper boat
I threw it on the surface of this water like in a game,
hoping it would carry me far away.
Today I am the killer whale,
19
often beautiful,
waiting for her fisherman.
Svetlana Cârstean, born in 1969 in Botoșani, debuted in 1995, in the collective volume Tablou de familie (Family Portrait) with the poem “Floarea de menghină” (The Vise Flower), which would also give the name of her first individual poetry book, in 2008, a few poems of which have already been translated into French. Over the years, she published articles, interviews, and poems in Romanian publications such as Dilema, Observator Cultural or România Literară.