Poems and Tales from Romania | Page 4

Simona Sumanaru
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.
Eve felt lonely again, this time with no refuge in the refugee camp. In an imagined dialogue with her, I would have asked her: "Why don't you write what you feel? Why don't you write about your spiritual wanderings?" "I don't master the punctuation marks well," she would have said. "People say that in life they don't know what's coming next. I don't know what is coming next either, but I know what is NOT coming next in my life here, so my dots become exclamation points and I say Beware
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