Part 2

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Poems and Tales from Romania, by Simona Sumanaru and Michael Hart (C) 1999-2000 by Simona Sumanaru and Michael Hart

Poem #1

Broken Flights

The broken wing Has become a tear, As a home It finds refuge Under one eye. . .

The broken wings Have become tears As a home They have found refuge Under both eyes. . . .

Flights, flights, Broken flights Now become refugees Under tear filled eyes. . .

There is nothing Left of sight.

***

Story #1

BEDTIME WORRIES

The Story

I was born and raised in an orchard known by the name of Eden, 16th orange tree on the left, and all my future hopes had been Left there with the Ultimate Orange.

From what I can tell now, in this position of a painter detached from his painting, there was nothing that you have not already seen or built yourself about the way the orchard was structured, ruled or taken care of. It was just a world, though I recollect within the Garden there was a center of energetic emanation, in the shape of a circle of a small diameter, having the made-up features of a human Fun Fair and which they called, given its conceptual schema, the Wheel of Fortune. It had been designed long before I was born, and before most of the people I know of or inherited something from were born as well. Seen from the outside, the whole gizmo was looking like the clearing of a forest or like a woman's heart, at once shiny and shadowy, open and hidden behind her instinctual veils. Surrounded by a range of tall grown apple-trees, the Park was the Big Attraction for each of us, Eden inhabitants.

By the time I learned how to walk, so you can guess my steps were being haltingly taken my mind and my feet always tended to go towards the apple trees, green and inviting as they were, projecting their leafy silhouettes on the frowned face of the fall sky. I say "frowned face" because the sky was crying a lot that specific fall, and I could see its eyebrows of clouds turning purple or maybe violet, and then dark blue. But who could tell exactly how an angry face changes color, name the boundaries between serenity and gloom, since all you distinctly perceive with your inner eye is the anger...?

The majestic apple-trees were unanimously loved, much more loved than the nut-trees for instance, because people didn't have the required patience to crack the nutshells open and taste the fruit. Only the crows knew how to do that artistically with a dance of their beaks, but what a pity, they were designed to be birds. Dark birds. Therefore, the people of Eden always went for the apples with their mysterious perfume and shiny skin, beautifully polished by the autumn rain. Usually at sunset, while the sleepy birds were having their mystical ritual of initiation in Phoenix's art of rebirth, the Garden's human inhabitants -less artistic but more hungry than the dark crows themselves were silently heading for the circle of apple-trees, perfectly rendered on the canvas of the twilight, their leafy crowns in the shape of an arch. Any resemblance with a circus bolt could be significant.

The inhabitants of Eden, as highly ambitious and responsible persons, were constantly looking for shadows, willing to give it a shot in finding their shattered dreams abandoned somehow in the games of the past and now supposed to dwell in the merry-go- round, the Wheel of Fortune, the Circus. They were doing it, to quote them: "Just for fun in our world's Fun Fair, like a bedtime loisir."

Beneath the dark and orange shadows which can be somehow reproduced by the color range of the fireworks you bathe in today the earth was utterly alive and breathing. The numerous families of ants, known as hardworking and also, in situations of necessity, fellow-devouring creatures were putting their young to sleep with a prayer for grains and shiny days. Some wonder nowadays who on earth or in the skies could listen to the minuscule prayers of an ant. I let them wonder.

The life of the Garden in its small size was not at all minimized for people with binocular vision. These endowed people managed to understand that the same earth who had once breathed us out through its lungs had also breathed ants through its pores. Thus we got to count small hearts and big hearts, small hopes and big hopes and people that were in between, insectlike molded instinctual to paroxysm in situations of necessity therefore half human. The scientists of Eden called them the- half-blind-half-awake-half-hearted-half-humans, a made-up qualificative and pretty hard to memorize since no name has been invented yet for things that were struggling in the middle of what we held as the Being Humane Scale. Statisticians, in their turn, noted down in their papers the unprecedented discovery of an astonishingly complete population of the above-mentioned category.

Life went through its normal range of heart-perceived phases in the Garden where I was born. The full meaning of the cycle light-darkness was heard echoing even in the pulsations of the fungi attached to the trunks of the trees. And yes, there were parasites, the concept of parasitism (or there was symbiosis, if you wish) in the Garden of Eden. As for me, I was always lonely, never found a friend because friends showed up when I wasn't looking and disappeared quickly when I turned around. All by myself night and day, I found these petty pleasures which were my major concerns and top 10 on my personal Being Humane Scale. Thus I loved to watch the ritual of metamorphosing our reality into the reality of dreams overnight, and having read some Freud, I was always wondering who fell asleep first, the tree or the fungus, the host or the ghost. I loved to watch the world change coordinates with the Silent Heaven of the Angels, in the sense that nothing mean could be said while people's minds were half- alive, that is deeply asleep to the eyes of this world.

Most of the women who inhabited the Garden of Eden were getting pregnant in fall, because they were taught the earth was gestating with fruits and their womb was like the earth. This way the population increased rapidly and the hunger grew with the same speed. The earthy hunger, that is, a disease much more dangerous and mind-attacking than the learned doctors could even dare to predict. Yet the Garden was ignorantly sleeping every night and the women's wombs, like the earth, grew heavy with fruits, gestating full-season.

Beneath the branches rich with green unearthy smell, in their yet earthy beds of grass from where the snakes of sin were lurking, the young boys of the Eden's mothers were growing to become Abel and Cain, or only Abel, or only Cain. A matter to be decided upon at midnight, by Eve, the wanderer and the mistress of heart-dictated directions.

Eve was a beautiful young woman by then. An all-loving mother of all the wombs and all their fruits. One time I saw her in the distance, wandering in the Park. That's when she became part of my painting. She looked so unprotectedly naked and so shiny beneath the apple trees' arch, yet it could have been my eyes. A statue carved in flesh maybe Rodin's while thinking of Camille her skin the color of the sand, so young and shiny like the rays of the New Moon. I had been told she was the Wife, the Given One. I tacitly embraced her much gossiped idealism and dreamed of her blue eyes, the deep blue eyes of what they called a Gift. Yet to her, from what I perceived, she was only the rib, penetrating the flesh and longing for a duplication into Something Else. Something Tasty. Eve had an insatiable heart; she was always hungry for the unborn Adams with their unborn loves and poems hiding in the shadows of the Park. Through her, the rib aimed high, so high that the final goal could not be guessed by the mind, only perceived by the senses. Eve had been born a lonely woman and stayed like that since the Adam in her bed got so bored of loving himself. Life at home was like dying of hope suffocation, keeping the claustrophobic indoors and telling him that you are out and doing fine.

The Fun Fair was the place where something was always happening, a bird would sing, an ant would die, a leaf would fall young and very green. Good things and bad things. Plus the Fun Fair's keeper was speaking in rhymes and the power of his words- a melody- kept on resounding in Eve's ears:

Looking for the Ultimate Satisfaction?

We have Forbidden Mellow Apple Biting at your discretion!

People presumed (and I see they still presume) that that was why Eve had all those terrible bedtime worries she was continuously complaining about. She called them heart-migraines and flesh insomnias. Some thought she had gone crazy with no real husband at home, some thought she was sane when she said that the apple- trees of beauty were having nightmares too, and that their leafy crowns were giving her the whispered messages from the Honey Moon. So people listened for hours, for days, for weeks and no distinct sound could be heard coming from the apple-trees. They tried harder, some of them got inspired and composed beautiful music, and at the changing of the year they all felt older, much more older than a year older and scared, much more scared than they had been of the things they had used to know before as being terrible.