INFINITE AT PLAY

Our Sunday walk outside the village,
into the countryside frosted silence,
just a few metres after the asphalt
the path begins, in icy stillness,
the dogs pull at the leash, pant eagerly,
in puffs of breath like the horses of our memory,
which foresaw in their legs the fields’ threads…

our Sunday walk and rite, towards the still
cold and crackling stones of the hill
and now on our feet our gaze taking in a line
of briny needles like fish scales, a line on end
of briny thin gossamers of leaves’ frames
or grass blades,
white arabesques of sky froth,
lace signatures
on the hardened black,
sky and earth
letting go
of their vowels and consonants
like a breath
of faith

“it’s just frost” you say
“ pure frost on grass”
and pass your fingers
on the feather-blade showing
frost dissolving like powder

while I at once smell hay,
highly improbable, yes,
in the dead of winter,
but what do we know of grass
and infinite at play?


I am really into Frost in these days, also because I am getting ready for a last ( unfortunately) lesson on him at the university the day after tomorrow. A few years ago I wrote Infinite At Play and I wasn't at all reading Frost, but now I feel there might be a tiny little bit of his mood in this poem.

IN A DISUSED GRAVEYARD by Robert Frost

The living come with grassy tread
To read the gravestones on the hill;
The graveyard draws the living still,
But never anymore the dead.
The verses in it say and say:
"The ones who living come today
To read the stones and go away
Tomorrow dead will come to stay."
So sure of death the marbles rhyme,
Yet can't help marking all the time
How no one dead will seem to come.
What is it men are shrinking from?
It would be easy to be clever
And tell the stones: Men hate to die
And have stopped dying now forever.
I think they would believe the lie.


Today I had what I now call "The Classical Jolt" reading this poem by Frost, in particular with the last four lines. Once more I thought that poems can hit at once a target in the reader, actually I was "feeling" the last four lines "arriving" before reading them.

NOT JUST MOUNTAINS

The stony silence of the scree
not broken by reinforced
by the dropping and rolling
of a single stone.
The marmot out of a hole
like a root’s soul,
a whistle piercing
the seconds’ heart,
the resin smell filling
a beehive of pine needles
with its cleansed sunlit heat,
the sign at last: red and white
on the grey rock,
two fat stripes
that are the steps’ reassurance,
in the wood now, soft turf underfoot
a fulfilment after the rasping
hardness of the scree.
And later the wood smell welcoming
your sweater in the drawer.
Not just mountains.

This poem was published in Summer 2011 in the on-line magazine ken*again. It came to my mind because I have just had the news -actually I should have already known that but I had forgotten- that a poem I wrote in the same period of time ( The Paths) is going to appear in Upstairs At Duroc, a print magazine.
I wrote several poems about "being" in the mountains in the summer 2010, I consider it as "another life", it was a marvellous month, July, in which we hiked, me, my wife and a childhood friend -who kindly drove us with his car to the various strategic places- in the high mountains around Cortina.

NOTHING GOLD CAN STAY by Robert Frost

I have had the luck of participating at a seminar, here in Venice at the university, on Robert Frost. One of the poems taken into consideration expresses a simple and classical beauty, its theme is one of those many couldn’t not come across, I think I have touched it on my own in a poem I will enclose to this post after Frost’s ( and which I have already put in some older post ). Maybe the first who highlighted the theme was Shakespeare with his line “And every fair from fair sometime declines”. How can we call it: “The natural fast declining into the ordinary”? You can find a better expression. But maybe the very title of Frost’s poem is the best.
And if, dear blog-friends you have written a poem you feel appropriate on the matter send it to me in the comments and I’ll put it in a future post.


NOTHING GOLD CAN STAY by Robert Frost

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf,
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.



BLACKBIRD AT DAWN

The simple
marvel of being there
on the freshly cut grass of the lawn,
hopping.
Or when, in a blink of an eye,
you shrug the world away
remembering what you were
“before”:
naked, scattered and joyfully careless
in empty space.
Then, after such a glimpse,
“Nothing magnificent, nothing unknown”
but just sunrise
and the necessary normality
of the rest of the day,
the world with its cargo of “afterwards”.