Poems and Tales from Romania | Page 3

my future hopes had been Left there with the Ultimate Orange.
From what I can tell now, in this position of a painter detached from his painting, there was nothing that you have not already seen or built yourself about the way the orchard was structured, ruled or taken care of. It was just a world, though I recollect within the Garden there was a center of energetic emanation, in the shape of a circle of a small diameter, having the made-up features of a human Fun Fair and which they called, given its conceptual schema, the Wheel of Fortune. It had been designed long before I was born, and before most of the people I know of or inherited something from were born as well. Seen from the outside, the whole gizmo was looking like the clearing of a forest or like a woman's heart, at once shiny and shadowy, open and hidden behind her instinctual veils. Surrounded by a range of tall grown apple-trees, the Park was the Big Attraction for each of us, Eden inhabitants.
By the time I learned how to walk, so you can guess my steps were being haltingly taken my mind and my feet always tended to go towards the apple trees, green and inviting as they were, projecting their leafy silhouettes on the frowned face of the fall sky. I say "frowned face" because the sky was crying a lot that specific fall, and I could see its eyebrows of clouds turning purple or maybe violet, and then dark blue. But who could tell exactly how an angry face changes color, name the boundaries between serenity and gloom, since all you distinctly perceive with your inner eye is the anger...?
The majestic apple-trees were unanimously loved, much more loved than the nut-trees for instance, because people didn't have the required patience to crack the nutshells open and taste the fruit. Only the crows knew how to do that artistically with a dance of their beaks, but what a pity, they were designed to be birds. Dark birds. Therefore, the people of Eden always went for the apples with their mysterious perfume and shiny skin, beautifully polished by the autumn rain. Usually at sunset, while the sleepy birds were having their mystical ritual of initiation in Phoenix's art of rebirth, the Garden's human inhabitants -less artistic but more hungry than the dark crows themselves were silently heading for the circle of apple-trees, perfectly rendered on the canvas of the twilight, their leafy crowns in the shape of an arch. Any resemblance with a circus bolt could be significant.
The inhabitants of Eden, as highly ambitious and responsible persons, were constantly looking for shadows, willing to give it a shot in finding their shattered dreams abandoned somehow in the games of the past and now supposed to dwell in the merry-go- round, the Wheel of Fortune, the Circus. They were doing it, to quote them: "Just for fun in our world's Fun Fair, like a bedtime loisir."
Beneath the dark and orange shadows which can be somehow reproduced by the color range of the fireworks you bathe in today the earth was utterly alive and breathing. The numerous families of ants, known as hardworking and also, in situations of necessity, fellow-devouring creatures were putting their young to sleep with a prayer for grains and shiny days. Some wonder nowadays who on earth or in the skies could listen to the minuscule prayers of an ant. I let them wonder.
The life of the Garden in its small size was not at all minimized for people with binocular vision. These endowed people managed to understand that the same earth who had once breathed us out through its lungs had also breathed ants through its pores. Thus we got to count small hearts and big hearts, small hopes and big hopes and people that were in between, insectlike molded instinctual to paroxysm in situations of necessity therefore half human. The scientists of Eden called them the- half-blind-half-awake-half-hearted-half-humans, a made-up qualificative and pretty hard to memorize since no name has been invented yet for things that were struggling in the middle of what we held as the Being Humane Scale. Statisticians, in their turn, noted down in their papers the unprecedented discovery of an astonishingly complete population of the above-mentioned category.
Life went through its normal range of heart-perceived phases in the Garden where I was born. The full meaning of the cycle light-darkness was heard echoing even in the pulsations of the fungi attached to the trunks of the trees. And yes, there were parasites, the concept of parasitism (or there was symbiosis, if you wish) in the Garden of Eden. As for me, I was always lonely, never found a friend because friends showed up when I wasn't looking and disappeared quickly