"Crime of a Lily" and other poems

by Stephan Roll

Translated from the Romanian by Henry Finch

Crime of a Lily

In the moonlight your eye lacks a pupil
But flowers you lead by hand

Inverse praying to the consecrated saints
Like the taste of the fountain’s black stones

Sifting between empty arms

I watched you from the precipice
As in a window compartment

In the farrier’s workshop
The iron transforms into roses
Throwing confetti flames
Over his hands like a spider of embers
His child with hair like washed gold
Do not forget on the table, in a bowl of lentils, sunlight
And in the shoes throwing small holes of stars
Do not forget that between the two of us is a long corridor of blood
On that surprised night
Looking for a door
With hands eaten by the toneless embankment
You took a path
Trees came out of the earth
And at every stretch a street lamp
Like a star in a cage
Waiting.

Unspeakable Poem

Confluent until the eyes cross themselves
with a flight trembling murmur of water,
the blood in the heart shrivels like berries into paste
on an erotic sea shore between the two eyelids.

Are turning in the body with leeches on the back,
gorging when climbing like pulling on an ear if eavesdropping.
How vast between stones breaking a song
is scattering itself to ascend over you like a night of many stars. 

Afterwards, outlining your loss with waves in décolletege,
shimmering curls of foam I elliptically whisper.
Next to you the storm is throwing me – I am
like an anchor of apocalyptic fish bones.

The waiting follows us like a migration in the blue autumn,
with kisses in a forgotten nest,
with lights gripped in glances like flowers in vases
to drip their perfume all over their hands.