Poem
Patrick McGuinness
The Fly, by Liviu Campanu
The Fly, by Liviu Campanu
The Fly, by Liviu Campanu
Another of your letters, Cilea, and the paper goesfor weeks in my pocket, folded, unfolded, becomes soft as cotton
as the words fade and have to be guessed at;
or, better still, replaced with words I wish you’d written,
wish you’d write. As for the envelope, I’ve licked the flakes
of gum along the seal, and fancied I tasted you: the candy
of your lipstick and a haunting of Duty-Free smoke.
You tasted of airports, Diplomatic Clubs, Politburo shopping malls,
while I’m the bluebottle on his flypaper turnstile, pumping
the sugar from the poison, twisting in the dead breeze,
riveted by glucose hits . . . I’m sinking deeper and deeper
into the white shallows of the page, what I remember of your eyes.
© 2013, Patrick McGuinness
This poem purports to be a translation of a poem by Romanian poet Liviu Campanu. Campanu is a fictional character, who appears in Patrick McGuinness\' novel The Last Hundred Days.
Patrick McGuinness
(Tunisia, 1968)
Patrick McGuinness is a poet, novelist, translator and academic, a professor of French and Comparative Literature at Oxford University and a Fellow of St Anne’s College, Oxford, where he has taught since 1998. He lives in North West Wales. His poetry, published by Carcanet, has won an Eric Gregory Award, the American Poetry Foundations Levinson Prize in 2003, the Poetry Business Prize in 2006, ...
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The Fly, by Liviu Campanu
Another of your letters, Cilea, and the paper goesfor weeks in my pocket, folded, unfolded, becomes soft as cotton
as the words fade and have to be guessed at;
or, better still, replaced with words I wish you’d written,
wish you’d write. As for the envelope, I’ve licked the flakes
of gum along the seal, and fancied I tasted you: the candy
of your lipstick and a haunting of Duty-Free smoke.
You tasted of airports, Diplomatic Clubs, Politburo shopping malls,
while I’m the bluebottle on his flypaper turnstile, pumping
the sugar from the poison, twisting in the dead breeze,
riveted by glucose hits . . . I’m sinking deeper and deeper
into the white shallows of the page, what I remember of your eyes.
The Fly, by Liviu Campanu
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