A New Attitude

I shall flee before the first snowfall
This rat-trap of a city
Which fawns at my feet
With its glowing billboards
Singeing my shoulders

Happiness is a matter of attitude
The same way snow falls

From right to left
And not even one snowflake

Reaches the pavement never
And nothing will ever be

Like in childhood
Although from my bed
I can now see the airplanes flying
From one building to the next
In perfect alignment

With the odd numbered floors

I must be cordial, positive, cool
In my leisure shoes
Slapping below my fake fur
I will smoke only in secret towards sunset
Eulogizing charitable foundations,
City taxes and the society of polar wolves
And if I should adopt a specimen
They will send me a pendant

With a little angel
And a few printed labels
With my name in orange trims.

Translated by Isaiah Sheffer with the author

* * * * *

The Shirt of Water

I live in a word.
I moved there with my weapons, possessions and sins
ignoring my parents' precepts:
don't build a house with a staircase to heaven
don't lie to yourself when
loneliness foresakes for a moment
don't yearn for anyone else's illusions
and above all never
get caught in your own word, the sinful saint.

This space is narrow. We feel each other's breath -
air-vowels, earth-consonants.
I pay my bills on time
and turn off the lights after every syllable.
I'd consider myself a lucky tenant here
except that night after night my dreams become louder
and force me to face the unspoken
that can no longer be pent up in our extravagant penthouse

Then my own word haunts me like a ghost
..........................he flicks his treacherous tongue
..........................in my unwritten books
my slave, he wants me only to obey him
as my master
his whips crack their lead tips at the world's edge. 

I live in a word as in a shirt of water
at its seams I feign freedom
chewed-up metaphors stick to my eyelids.
God tastes his own weakness
on the tip of his tongue.
This is an affront, visitors from foreign lands tell me
wounds masked by the illusion of unrestricted speech
tattoos on open arteries.

Translated by Adam J. Sorkin

* * * * *

The Caretaker of Dreams

In every dream I speak a different language

and in every language words have a different color

hot-air balloons rise from their foreheads

inflated on the purple horizon

From all we say in our lives before and to come

there remains only the flight path,
the wing's whisper,
the island where I took refuge behind so many walls

where I scratch not hearts or love-words
only the signs of the language I speak in my sleep
a dialect of Old Angelic still useful for crossing borders

I have a vocation for happiness
a sort of unconscious facility
at making an ally of the caretaker of dreams
who's always ready to lend me the silk cocoon
in which words slip past customs
intimate objects I carry with me undeclared

Nothing's to be done about my golden dowry.
Dead languages yield only the powdery dust of stars.

                           Translated by Adam J. Sorkin

* * * * *

The first time I found out about America was
When a very tall lady came to our house
Waving her very long mantle
In which, more than likely,
She flew over the ocean
And placed upon our table a huge jar
Of peanut butter.


Is this how it is there? I asked
Sticking my little finger half way
Into the immensity of the jar.
This is how it is, the adults reassured me,
Though even they couldn't imagine
How you can get so much butter
From the peanut, a strange animal
They had never laid eyes on.
And they brought the distinguished messenger
Two chairs so she could sit comfortably
In our midst.


And Brooklyn Bridge under which
New York sleeps when it's cold,
Is it still there?
Still there. Everything is huge there,
I was told in hints.
The peanut butter turned my stomach
But oddly, I liked it.
I kept on asking questions like that
Until I finished the jar
From which entire generations
Gobbled up in one breath the American Dream.

I was left suspended between childhood
And the image of death in a gaunt woman
Who whispered in my ear the last story
With the destiny changing in the middle.
The room twirled with me, I was cold but felt well
And sheltered myself under an endless bridge
I was stretched out over those two empty chairs
My feet frozen.
Then the very tall woman covered me up
In her very long mantle and we flew together.

Translated by Julian Semilian

Poems by Carmen Firan