a letter past midnight

the look of that branch-dwelling
sheepish creature
in the numbing silence
of your joyous lines
imploring the gods of poetry
to have mercy on me
bring back the day
when we were whole
and looked out
the window
at the cherry trees
searching for some hidden soul
beyond appearances
the space between us
surveyable
we did not long for the future
for a different existence
for another landscape
just for each other
in the breeze
of that empty dirt road
under the autumn stars
do you remember
the dwarf trees
the boulders
us walking

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, for which he received a 2017 NEA Translation grant, was published in 2018 as 'Something is still present and isn't, of what's gone.' Aracne editrice, Rome. He was the guest editor of the Fall 2011 issue of International Poetry Review.