Issue 27 - Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art

Heirophany
On this American hill
I am transformed:
sometimes into a loving wife,
sometimes into a witch,
ready to turn this green landscape
into the blackest black,
sometimes into a synthetic cloud,
sometimes into a bare apple tree,
lovers screaming in loneliness
under my forbidden branches.
This hill does not hold the dead in its belly,
nor does it have a tongue in its mouth.
It is simply an expensive creation
where from time to time
I come to take samples of the earth.
It's like the moon's landscape
where the hill of my father's village in Apold
doesn't fit
with its tiny wooden church
pulled on wheels for three weeks,
three days and three nights,
by three young men, three old men
and three boys who dragged it
over three hills, three rivers,
and across three wide roads
to bring it into the light of home.
I have never slept among such innocence
as in the lap of that Transylvanian hill
under apple trees heavy with fruit,
the cemetery earth surrounding my hot thighs,
my dear known, and unknown dead
hung around my neck
like a dandelion chain,
their words floating around me,
the absolute reality
of my Transylvanian hill.
Comic Tunnel, Dialogue of Body and Soul
You pass through me
like a half-human comet
and you imagine
you will get somewhere.