you get used to silence
that emptying-out of the whisper
whose echo says you matter
the way you got used
to the separating distance
first envisaging
the familiar places
inhabited by that singular life
transported to faraway landscapes
with other trees and grasses
then the imagination
stops playing those games
and the imageless icon
fills the air surrounding you
without disturbing its transparency
for you first take silence
to be that vessel filled with the soundless
outpouring of an urgent melody
too hurried to stop for words or tears
later it unloads the unsaid
a tied-up bag that slips, too heavy, to the ground
to become the distance
separating the moon from the now

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Victor Pambuccian is a professor of mathematics at Arizona State University. His poetry translations, from Romanian, French, and German, have appeared in Words Without Borders, Two Lines, International Poetry Review, Pleiades, and Black Sun Lit. A bilingual anthology of Rumanian avant-garde poetry, with his translations, was published in 2018.