Friday, August 31, 2012

"Be careful of the little bones"


Rabbit in tomato sauce, as a child
in front of a heaven of fields, in a kitchen
with the window on vineyards, granddad at lunch
with a glass of his own homemade wine.
Light red, full of summer sun.
Full of my gaze.
The past. What’s gone.
Vivid because it can’t be retrieved.
Except for sentences like this:
“Be careful of the little bones”.
At lunch, all of us,
sucking and slurping to the sky,
it was from grandma I think I heard
the first time, these words to granddad,
words like breaths in the haze of time.

And now on an evening a few days ago,
a cousin I hadn't met for ages
cooked rabbit… so ”the little bones…
“careful..”

Maybe the eternal present streams
in words like a mountain spring,
utterance is all.

And words
and “the little bones”
are the same thing.

Tuesday, August 28, 2012

AND BY THE WAY


A new school year is starting.
And Bob Dylan is going to release a new album.
Good sign?

A recurrence.
Maybe is just great to recur and so keep going.

http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=160015988&m=160017027



IN BETWEEN

They have just passed. The lines.
Just passed. For the umpteenth time.
They are so fast. Like virtue,
you write of it, the Tao says, when it's no more.

I had them all on the tip on my tongue, and pen.
But
my pen wasn't at hand and
I was too lazy or drunk or normal to look for one at once.

And again, the right thing slurred and blurred
in between the lines of the day,
the present that lures you into words like flashes,
and passes on, leaving you golden and astray.




Sunday, August 26, 2012

SHAKESPEARE

Friends booked for me in early August "The Taming of the Shrew" at The Globe.
A sheer delight. The taste of The Globe in the very Shakespearian times was given at the beginning as an impromptu ( I hope this word is right! ) extraordinary performance, as an improvised "live" prologue, out of the script, when, the one who would reveal himself as the main actor later, appeared dressed in a contemporary jumpsuit among the standing crowd by the stage and kept on walking staggering onto the stage, looking totally drunk and riotous and then pissed in a corner. It was, not completely clearly, but clearly enough water what gushed forth but...for a few moments I had thought that this sort of wino was a real one. Outstanding act.
Superb.
Worth writing a poem about it, though very difficult.

And superb the shrew. Great energy, dish-throwing and all that...Richard Burton and Elisabeth Taylor in the film were two gentle birds in comparison...

And before leaving the theatre I found a jewel, this book: "Will & Me" ( How Shakespeare Took Over My Life ) by Dominic Dromgoogle, the Artistic Director of The Globe theatre.
Unputdownable work.

Sunday, August 12, 2012

Hopelessly submitting

I enclose an email I am sending after reading discouraging submission guidelines and thinking, dear blogfriends, about the titanic energy those few privileged poets who publish a collection must have... I feel very weak thinking of them.

Dear-------, I am an Italian teacher of English. I have contacted you many times in the past, but the contact got somehow always lost, three or four times. It's clear that it's almost impossible for me to submit.
I have anyway finally put together a collection, but I read that you have a list of booked manuscript until 2015.
But if I wait, and live, until 2015, on that year you will have a list until 2018 and so on.
I enclose to this email my manuscript which I also have on print and God, if he likes, will provide.
Life is short.

By the way, I have never heard from you about some poems of mine you told me you had selected in the only message you sent me two years ago.

Anyway, considering our past exchanges, characterized mainly by unanswered messages of mine I doubt I will ever hear from you.

All the same all my best.

Davide Trame
Venice-Italy