Ruxandra Cesereanu: Idling Periphonia

I adorned my thighs, my hips, my ankles with thyme garlands,
on a gloriously reigning afternoon.
I smelled like a maenad,
but my auspicious god had been sleeping for three nights.
I was dozing amongst plump cats
traveling fishermen had brought on their boats,
when I felt a claw in my chest
as if my ribs had been entered by birds.
Their master, the fowler, had twiggy hair and a body like a candlestick,
in the scented temples glowing at the horizon.
Periphonia, stay away from love as if it were a curse,
do not shut the door on my advice.
Demeter was braiding my hair like a tamed lioness,
my young woman braids
which were my noose in front of Hades, but also my rescue rope.
The sea was cloaking my body like a steaming god’s tongue,
I was yearning after a thing I could not smell
and could not see.
My bosom was shimmering like cups with fig wine,
tanned by the mad sun rolling oranges.
I was purring like a cat, I was simmering like a woman,
I was twitching from the shell, thousands of twining venules.
From afar I could hear a fowler’s voice:
come the cage, Periphonia,
come, beloved olive Kore.
On the roadside, in the cells, the soul
of the dead burnt in melted candles,
my fulfilled womanly flesh was like saffron,
saffron stirred by salamanders.
Languorous beast, suckled by stillness,
who are you, torpid Periphonia?
The sun stirred whirls like amber on my skin,
it stirred brown paths and flames and hot death glaze,
in the festive torpor.
Chalk heat creatures climbed
my body as if climbing a starry volcano,
there were yellow haired herbs
and the wreaths of the precipice enlaced my head.
Endlessly clad within myself,
I stroked myself, I smelt, I bit
the steamy comb of the giggling flesh.
My adorers rubbed wild oils on me,
their hands rustled busily like rattles,
they painted the hair in dark clay from the mouths of the dead.
My bloodstreams tensed,
so alive that they would step even on death,
chaining him and making him forget about himself.
There was hyacinth in the sea air,
the spindle of my body went deep down through the sand,
among sunflower jellyfish and dandelion-scaled fish,
my closed eyelids seamen on thrashed gold meadows.
Oh, fertile Periphonia, the twiggy haired fowler shouted,
while I was quivering like a soft Aegean Sea big cat,
mistress of death, if you are there,
turn light into delight and drowsiness into drunkenness,
to blind death in the agonising wasteland.

KORE PERSEPHONE (2004)