I saw New York and Paris, San Francisco and Frankfurt.
I’ve been to places I’ve never dreamed of going.
I came back with a stack of photographs
and death in my soul.
I had thought that I meant something and that my life meant something.
I had seen God’s eye looking at me through the microscope,
watching me writhe on the slide.
Now I don’t believe in anything.
I was good for a dumb stability,
for a deep forgetfulness,
for a lonely vagina.
I was wandering through places that are no more.
Oh, my world is no more!
My world is no more!
My stinky world in which I meant something.
I, mircea cartarescu, am nobody in the new world.
There are 1,038 mircea cartarescus here
and people 1,038 times better than me.
There are books here better than everything I’ve ever done,
and women who couldn’t care less about them.
The pragmatic egg breaks and God is here
in His own creation, a fashionably-dressed God
in beautiful cities and splendid autumns
and in a sort of mild nostalgia of southern Virginia in
Dorin’s car (country music from the speakers).

I see my own limits
and I see the limits of literature,
for I have seen Sears Tower
and I saw Chicago, in greenish mist, from above; from Sears Tower
and on the terrace of skyscrapers, there were two greyhounds running
and I told Gabriela, as we drank Coca-Cola,
that my life is over.
It’s like in Eliot’s Magi: I saw the West,
I flew over Manhattan,
I watched with big eyes my charmed death,
for this is my death.
I watched the windows, with Suzuki motorcycles,
and saw my reflection in them, dirty, anonymous.
I walked for hours on Konigstrasse
among the kids on skateboards.
I was the black-and-white man in a color photograph,
Kafka among Arcadians.
Poems, pohemes, philosentiems,
modernisms, and talks at the pub over who’s the greatest.
Rankings made on the train (back from Onesti), which are the best
Romanian novels today,
the best ten poets alive,
just like the Papuans
who even now spit into the palm wine cauldron, so it will ferment…
but poetry is a sign of underdevelopment
and so is looking your God in the eye
although you never saw Him…

I saw computer games and bookstores and both looked the same to me.
I understand philosophy is entertainment
and mysticism is show-biz,
that there are only surfaces here
but they’re more complex than any depth.
What can I be there? A delighted man, crazed with happiness,
but his life would be over.
His life would be permanently fucked, like the worm in the cherry
who once thought he was something
until he woke up in the light with garbage next to him.
My garbage, my poor poems.
I saw people for whom the abortion law
was more important than the fall of the soviets.
I saw tall and blue skies, full of the flickering lights of planes
and knew the howl of the four thousand universities.
I climbed up the Eiffel tower on the stairs
and went up the Pompidou Center through the Plexiglas tube
and in Iowa City I went to Fox Head….

I chatted about postmodernism in Ludwigsburg
with Hassan and Bradbury and Gass and Barth and Federman,
just like the condemned braves his executioner
I recorded on my portable recorder the wailing of the blade
that severed my head from my body.
I felt like crying seeing the luxury in Monrepos:
how is this possible? why were we born in vain?
why should we fight with Vadim and Funar?
why can’t we, for once, live?
why now, when we could finally live,
do we breathe again the putrid smell of the dumpsters?
Postmodernisms and forty-eighters,
deconstruction and tribalism,
pragmatism and umbilical cords,
and life, which is awry…
I saw San Francisco, the blue gulf with ships
and then farther away the ocean with forested islands,
the Pacific, if you can imagine!
I dipped my hands in the Pacific ocean, “thanking the Lord for my fingers.”
My soles were burning feverishly.
And at Ferlinghetti’s famous bookstore (it really exists!)
as if
you consciously entered your own dream, or a book…
the streets in San Francisco drove me crazy
and Grant Street with Chinese paraphernalia
and the huge palm trees and the very funny faces
in the hair salons
(the customers
did not see themselves in mirrors, but in color monitors).
And the American nights—remember, Mircea T.?—
next to your and Melissa’s cottage, after
we had watched SF movies the entire afternoon, eaten tacos,
and drunk Old Style beer.
When we went out we were overwhelmed by the stars
and the silent planes moving through them
and in your car, the old Ford, the air was frozen
and you took me, through the empty city, to my dear
Mayflower Residence Hall.
And the Thanksgiving and Halloween parades
with old bankers dressed as bears and clowns,
and the boy of Czech origin interested in Faulkner,
and the little Korean girl from the yellow Cambus,
and the melancholia of the yellow leaves in Iowa City,
and the two of us, Gabi and I, shopping for hours and hours
at Target and K Mart and Goodwill
and also at the fantastic mall downtown…
…I was chewing cinnamon mints during my first morning in Washington,
with my camera dangling on my neck, in the cold air in Dupont Circle…
… I paid $7 to see the Zoo in New Orleans,
and it was raining, and all the animals were in their shelters…
…in the taxi, arguing with the black driver,
not understanding a word he was saying: “Hey, man…”
…wonderful dinners in Chinese and Thai restaurants
but the most wonderful at Meandros, the Greeks in Soho…
…The Art Institute (full of impressionists)
…The Freak Museum (amazing: three Vermeers!)
…The National Gallery (Malevic retrospective).

A man frozen for a hundred years
opens his eyes and chooses to die.
What he saw was too beautiful and too sad.
For he had nobody there and he had a nail infection
and his teeth were so rotten
and in his mind
were all sorts of useless things
and everything he had ever done
was half the consistency of the wind.
A man had invented, on a distant island,
a sewing machine out of bamboo
and he thought he was a genius because none of his peers
had made up anything like it. And when the Dutch came,
they repaid him for the invention,
giving him an electric one instead.
(Thanks, he said, and chose to die.)
I don’t find my place, I’m no longer from here
and cannot be from there.

And poetry? I feel like the last Mohican,
ridiculous like Denver the dinosaur,
the best poetry is the bearable poetry,
nothing else: just bearable.
We made good poetry for ten years
without knowing what bad poetry we were making.
We made grand literature, and now we understand
that it cannot go through the door, precisely because it’s big,
too big, suffocated in its own fat.
This poem is not really a poem either,
for only what is not poetry
can endure as poetry,
only what is not poetry.
The West opened my eyes and banged my head against the upper doorframe.
I leave to others what my life has been until today
so that others believe in what I once believed,
so that others love what I once loved.
I can’t anymore,
can’t anymore, can’t anymore.