Zîcere means the act of saying, and it is written in a dialect of my own making — built from gathered village speech, anonymous folk verse, and standard Romanian chopped, enlarged, and diminished to fit each poem’s sound, until a Romanian speaker may know a word by its music and still have to reconstruct it. I wrote these poems with the same hand, in the same years, as the glass icons at Nicula; they are the verbal half of that practice. I handwrote each verse and pinned it to the walls of family homes, and what follows is its typewritten form, one page at a time. The first two were printed under the name CÎNDE, in an edition of fifty; the last I typed on a typewriter, corrected its diacritics, and published online at cinde.ro in 2002. The three volumes move from the language of saints through the language of neighbors to the language of weather, and end in the plainest register of all — a grandmother saying it is only good, look.
