Oana Avasilichioaei

The train moves in small sobs:
a loose anchor dragging on an ocean floor,
a body with a shell instead of a swollen belly,
and the roar of a conch instead of a throat.
The train moves
grinding rust off its weariness.
Through the window a scent of train lags;
thyme, oil and hot metal.
Skin sticks to plastic seats,
an orange peel falls on the floor,
everywhere the babble
of human sweat recoils.
See that woman in the corner
lurching with each movement of the train?
In that bag she hides people’s used stories.
She will hide yours in exchange for your shirt.

Beneath the house a river floats.
Old wood rots. Inert.
Black with water.
Mothers baptise their infants,
plunge them in, head first.
A sea-plane lands, stumbling in the current
and on the fields beyond,
pregnant with wheat,
a threshing machine combs the sun-flesh.
On the porch a woman.
Fashions eyelids out of myths,
her face, a gasp.
The threshing machine lurches then stops
before a blind man spinning
in a circle, taking pictures of the site.

In this park, layers of ruins have gathered.
Behind the foliage aged zoo animals vanish.
The pond stagnates.
Protected by an empty watchtower
a howl sinks
in the meter-thick lumps of walls,
sixteenth century survivors.
Swamped-in willows mourn.
Below the fortress
I sit in weeds
in the park of a childhood.
Here there is a silence fed
by centuries’ hush,
but if I press my ear
to the flat stones of the footpath
I might hear
a forfotă of merchants
trading cows, hens, hay, cheese and fabrics
or simply a war with the Turks
or an earthquake
that turns houses and churches
into wrecks and wrecks
into castle walls and walls into
crumbled rock and rock into streets…
Until a man with a wheelbarrow stops
by a curb, fills it with chunks
of dislodged sidewalk, all
the while glancing behind him
with a nervous crease on his brow.

1
The tower can not be sacrificed.
Climbing up is like climbing
the inside
of a conch shell. The wooden stair
is smooth groans with every step.
A map
a scroll
and paintings of kings
live on the wall behind panelled glass.
I like to ascend grope my way to the top
ruining my fingers
leave a bruise in the whitewash.
2
The tower begins
with a gate and an empty dungeon.
To the walls cling ghosts
of damask and glass.
Through an open casement the wind
taps the window against the parapet
like the tick of a clock.
The tower is real it taps.

From its battlements no one guards
the minutes of each day,
at sunset no one lights the oil lamp
warning the town that trade must stop,
no one stands
with their eyes fixed to the south
to look for enemies disguised in a cloud.
The tower is a folktale.
The tower permits only children to play
on its cumbersome stairs but parents
keep their babes locked
in at night. The tower is haunted they say.
A tailor swears that on summer nights
which seem to burn with the colour of wine,
passing by the castle gates, he’s heard
the laughter
and cry of a young girl’s mouth.
Only children believe him
and the tower is forgetful.