Rodica Draghincescu
Sight Doesn't Take Everything In


my loneliness flung her panties in the street
we made a decision to wear it in the open
(the history of this movement and its glory can be toasted
at its memorial between the first bench in the military park
and the first bench in the tribunal
a clothesline with panties in royal black)
I’ll exhaust myself saying aaaaaaaaaaaah into this gizmo
innermost essentials will prick my skin up to
and over my head among white scarves/veils
my scream thanks to which the most abstract of experiences
gets hypostatized in warm rivers
will come into intimate contact with the image
of water within
so confusingly concrete I’ll be swimming in myself
anyhow the silence outside has abandoned this place
when I write the word loneliness I write participation
in an inward fanfare of birds
in demonstrations of laid-off virginity
short words muscular pathways still remain
gray hair too (a tendency towards intellectualization
makes itself known in the synapse/thigh in debate versus buttocks)
miss photo so tall so special made real as much by affections
as by intelligent ideas
where it rains best color with fuji
so much imaginary plasma so much conscious flesh
feeling the fact that it’s a wrongly perceived concept
miss process with her navel thinking of an everyday brain
without the supernumeraries of mental principles
anyhow my loneliness can be said to be poetry
and poetry doesn’t wear panties
but deep psychic phenomena instead
where the world parades with a bare bottom
and it won’t depend on sight for sight doesn’t take everything in
in the final analysis I’m not even lonely
as I lie here under the nightlight

Translated from Romanian by Adam J. Sorkin and Antuza Genescu