EFEB WITH CYPRIPEDIUM Poem by Simona Popescu

Sweet ephebe, dear good friend,
shall I compare thee to what?
There's nothing to be measured against your cleanly beauty
and no filly
could in any way compete with you. That's why I find
to be around you
while all you do is loaf in your own world
laughing and waving those fingers lightly
as if playing an invisible syrinx oh so good to seek. You pamper yourself
and then stare in the air just
like a smooth statue; you start to dance in the half light
all by yourself, like a… cynaedus
or a bird in love.

You can't be touched by either men or women
and everything around you feels so rude.
I watch you with a thoughtless mind
just as one day I watched the pure
and mild concupiscence of a plant bearing
a name so funny, and yet so ethereal -
the femininely virile cypripedium
lost somewhere in a flower
shop window.

Dance, my dear friend! A stroboscope
divides you like a ghost. That is your beauty
manifold (an 18-year old - I keep recalling - Shiva).
You'll be away tomorrow.
Your long and fragrant hair will pile up on some grimy concrete floor
your locks will meet a barber's greasy hand
some brutish drill instructor will surely give you hell,
some old doctor will take time weighing,
groping you on the sly,
some stocky soldiers will tap you on the shoulder.
They'll drill you
almost kill you,
you, lazy one, will learn about virtus and labor.
They'll make a man out of you and then
you'll be chased by Priapus in the fall of his life
and by stupid languid wives…

Now you look like a dancing shadow
a filigree hidden in a Fauvist painting.
I would just wrap you up in a song
and forget you.
Let me think of you as the boy who
on a smoky day was reading much too serenely
while a distant bossa nova rhythm was playing
something by Charles d'Orléans
("Le monde est ennuyé de moy
Et moy pareillement lui")
well, who knows?

Dear good friend,
neither boy nor girl,
Endymion
whom I lock in my mind
to stare at you
at your pure beauty
thoughtless as if in a flower shop window.

In a mute, convoluted song I'd wrap you up
and thus forget you.