Vacuum
Darie Ducan
in translation by A.I. Scridon
“ . . . sì come rota ch’igualmente è mossa,
l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stele.”
— DANTE, Il Paradiso, Canto XXXIII
I.
Our eyes go bad,
our teeth go bad,
I can’t see anymore,
nobody sits
in the shadow of my canines
as if under the maple tree.
Grizzled, post-revolutionary
fizzy drinks become
faded, offset plaster.
The eyes see to the teeth,
cavities dig into the retina.
I feel as though
in ’98 I had
shot a soccer ball
onto the moon
and I can hear it now
deflating from
loneliness and accidie.
II.
You don’t exist . . .
You are the salt of insatiability.
What emerges from the pipe
is scalped smoke,
a landfill into which Lent
has spilled itself.
But, for this sound,
cripple deposits
have made perfect
people,
baptized in Vesuvius
by the blow of forgetting
directly over the head.
Worries have made you up
with whitener
as defense on cherry trees
with the Escariotan worm in wood.
III.
The Romania-England game began with a ball
thrown into the stadium as if from a courtyard . . .
It was as though we had given it our happiness and bellybutton lint.
Stelea’s head shone like the moon and we thought it was the moon in the gate
and from so much day and night he’s got good reflexes,
he’ll hammer it home, because he knows how to deviate tactfully, in liturgical dribbling.
Moldovan scores in minute 47.
A second later you can see the serum dripping into coach Glenn Hoddle’s perfusion,
how cherubs of sweat with white-on-white socks grab him by the rictus.
(Moldovan anointed his leg with rosin
and his scalp — from high fiddling — da capo. Somewhere, far away, the Cape of Good Hope trembled with fear . . .)
Neville, Adams, Beckham, Sheringham. They picked their cards and tactics . . .
The back of the head protected the adversary’s exchanges, the eyes had relocated
to the back of the head and didn’t want to return,
like the depressurization of Händel’s music in the hull of Emmental cheese,
self-taught dribbling on the clavichord,
cleats with an acoustic phrase —
the dome of the foul,
Ave Maria, Gratia plena . . .
Darie Ducan is a Romanian poet and playwright. He has published ten books of poetry and three books of theatre. He is currently pursuing a PhD on Harold Pinter and Eugéne Ionesco at the Sorbonne. He writes in both Romanian and French.
A.I. Scridon is a translator from Romanian to English. She is a contributing editor at E·ratio.
