Olga Broumas: Caritas – Ferencz Mónika fordítása

1.

Erik Satie, accused

once of formlessness, composed

a sonata titled: Composition in the Form

of a Pear. When I tell you

that it would take

more brilliance than Mozart

more melancholy precision than Brahms

to compose a sonata in the form of

your breasts, you

don’t believe me. I lie

next to your infidel sleep, all night

in pain

and lonely with my silenced

pleasure. Your breasts

in their moonlit pallor

invade me, lightly, like minor

fugues. I lie

between your sapling thighs, tongue

flat on your double lips, giving

voice, giving

voice. Opulent

as a continent in the rising light, you sleep

on, indifferent

to my gushing praises. It is

as it should be, Atlantis,

Cyprus, Crete, the encircled

civilizations, serene

in their tidal basins, dolphin-

loved, didn’t heed to the faint, the

riotous

praise

of the lapping sea.

2.

Your knees, those pinnacles

competing with the finest

dimpled, five-

year-old chins, are

dancing. Ecstatic as nuns

in their delirious habit, like

runaway needles on a multiple graph,

the first organic model of

seismographs, charting

the crest I keep you on

and on till all

the sensitive numbers on the

Richter scale ring out at

once, but

silently: a choir

of sundial alarums. You reach that place,

levitated by pleasure, the first

glimpse the melting

glacier must

have had, rounding the precipice,

of what came to be known as

Niagara Falls. After all this time,

every time,

like a finger inside

the tight-gummed,

spittle-bright, atavistic

suckle of

a newborn’s fragile-lipped

mouth, I

embrace you, my heart

a four-celled embryo, swimming

a pulse, a bloodstream that becomes, month

to month, less

of a stranger’s, more

intimate, her

own.

3.

There are people who do not explore the in-

sides of flowers — Sandra Hochman

With the clear

plastic speculum, transparent

and, when inserted, pink like the convex

carapace of a prawn, flashlight in hand, I

guide you

inside the small

cathedral of my cun+. The unexpected

light dazzles you. This flesh, my darling, always

invisible like the wet

sides of stones, the hidden

hemisphere of the moon, startles you

with its brilliance, the little

dome a spitting

miniature of the Haghia Sophia

with its circlet of openings

to the Mediterranean sun.

A woman-made language would

have as many synonyms for pink/light-filled/holy as

the Eskimo does

for snow: Speechless, you

shift the flashlight from

hand to hand, flickering. An orgy

of candles. Lourdes in mid-August. A flurry of

audible breaths, a seething

of holiness, and

behold

a tear

forms in the single eye, carmine

and catholic. You too, my darling, are

folded, clean

round, a light-filled temple, complete

with miraculous icon, shedding

her perfect tears, in touch

with the hidden hemispheres,

the dome

of our cyclops moon.

Marie Laurencin – Le Bal élégant, La Danse à la campagne