FIR TREE

Once I smelled in it

the fullness of iron green

and was gripped and swept

into a road of breaths

and shuffling dark green.

The deep North in an instantaneous gust.

Now that smell is faint,

like childhood, only a memory.

 

But all the same I keep

breathing it

sensing I am treasuring

the few drops I can gather

from the forest sap

in my cupped hands.

More than enough

on the way to the border.

A Christmas present.

The Christmas present I have just received comes from Tucson, Arizona. It is the issue n.22 of the magazine "The Laughing Dog, strictly poetry". In it my poem "Brewing" appears, a poem that, to tell you the truth, I had almost forgotten and quite neglected. It has been a pleasure rereading it and enjoying it a lot almost as if it weren't written by myself.
What's more, in this tiny, sober and beautiful magazine I am in the company of some very famous poets I used to "meet" in journals several years ago, at the beginning of the internet reign when still most submissions and publications were print. Some names : Lyn Lifshin, BZ Niditch, Valentina Cano and probably the most famous of all, Simon Perchick.
So to those who live in the US and might come across this post I recommend "The Laughing Dog".

A SMALL SPIDER IN DECEMBER

 

I have just caught a glimpse of it,

it has disappeared now under a picture,

tiny legs progressing, tiny

hints of forwardness.

Tiny but well defined.

Gracefully ineluctable.

For me an appreciation

of the warmth in my home

Since it’s almost winter outside

with freezing fog in a spreading bite,

so I can’t but like feeling I have

an oasis inside that grows

hosting life.

 

I think it’s just

what you want to last

in the end, of your home,

listen, maybe now you can fade

but this cherry-wood table

you are sitting at will remain

with a picture of Japanese gardens

at this side, on the wall

and a tiny spider staring under,

like a meaning beyond the soul.

BLUE GLACIER

You didn’t want to say anything.

You waited. When you spoke at the end

you could still hear the silence in between the syllables,

a blue glacier.

One of the few left. You felt glad.

It’s here now. You are walking on it,

each sentence swarming and dying into its solidity

so as not to let it melt.

THE COLD

 

It has come like a tale

whispered in

draughts' dreams

and chinks crashed

with air and stare,

the wind whooshing

all the way in.

The square is stark.

The space clean.

The land vast.

I, a sledge in the mind

and an ark in the heart,

freeze and slide.

NOVEMBER 2nd, BIRDS AT DAWN

 

Dark and low clouds outside

and the shuffling of leaves on leaves,

from the oak, rusty hue, dusty orange.

I’m in bed, shutters closed,

I am awake, I know it’s early

and I lie in the wake of my having been

early for ages, waiting for whatever

bides its time.

Dark and still, I sense the low clouds

in the absence of wind.

The countryside and its stare,

the scattering and gazing of here into there,

maybe I began as a digressing child

giving a face to the countryside,

eyes breathing, seeping into skin,

earth in its damp progressing within

and eyes crediting marvels, unseen,

loving the familiar unknown, within.

Now I am hearing a sound that’s almost a sting,

but it’s soon clear it is a close chirping

like tatted lace in the shutter

indulging in the fabric of its own matter.

The dark filling with fingers of light,

the chirping like an audible smile,

even now, on the year’s decline:

I can’t but believe in what begins.

MATTER

 

The stick your dog picks up on the street

looking back at you while walking,

eyes warm, alert and amused,

in his mouth a trophy to expose,

a clean, honed prey to carry about,

you would never have seen it,

and once he drops it another comes up

instantaneously, you never see him

picking it up and there is no

magician’s trick, just the quick walking,

this new one is even more honed

and white, like marble, and sharp,

a blade the moon has polished

together with the teeth now brandishing it,

it must have been so alluring and near,

it’s now what the skin of the soul reveals

piercing each second with what really is.

THE SNAIL

Stuck up on the inside of the shutter,

on my fist floor,

it has climbed and climbed

I suppose, slowly up on another

Mount of Fuji carrying with itself

what’s most holy,

the marvel and endurance

of what perseveres, slowly.

Certainly enjoying the damp

foundations, the mood

of this weather and time.

droplets of lines rising on lines.
 

Now it has been days,

stuck for days, looking like

it has found its own

among the many ways.

I gaze at the glistening

brown of its home,

will it last on the shutter

through the winter?

Well, it’s on the inside,

just  like a gaze staring in

and asking for what

we all ask for:

a bit of lastingness

and praise.

 

I dedicate this poem to my colleague and friend, and poet writing in Venetian dialect, Andrea Longega,  to whom I have first spoken of this snail during the umpteenth tired and tiring journey on a tiresome train back from school towards Venice.

Half amused, hearing about the snail he exclaimed (in an impossible to describe Venetian tone) : “And now you are going to write a poem on it, we can’t expect anything different, can we?”

Digital

  Now at school everything is digital, no paper registers any more. And the digital legal signature. The absurdity is to call it signature when for a signature you generally need a pen with which you produce letters, in other words you need write! In this case you click. You click-sign on your name, No words for that. Maybe an adjective. Ridicule, And another. Insubstantial. The virtual world is more and more a baseless fabric, a sense of no ground under your feet.

A dramatically increased volatility of being. More than an unbearable lightness. Where are we going, in any field, with the progress of digital dictatorship?

I have just sent this text message to a colleague:

 

Digital signature and all,

what can I tell?

An endless fall

into a bottomless well.

EDGE BEFORE THE FALL

 

The house speaks.

Aloneness after lunch.

Ants in between

the tiles above the sink,

the dark and now the light,

the home they’ve found,

a swarming sudden crowd

in their crowding blues,

in this chink of time,

on their own straight line.

I must get rid of them

( what would you do?)

I can’t be covered yet

by crawling silence.

 

The house speaks.

A leak from upstairs

and drops on the armchair

and the dog leaving it,

just annoyed or scared,

it’s the neighbor I learn,

ninety-six, he has messed

with the shower. Who helps him?

I wonder, in this house that speaks.

 

I am alone in it. In my beloved

desert lot. That’s it.

And I am still alive.

I didn’t choose to be alone

( and I didn’t choose to be alive either).

Life happens as it happens,

God knows, or does he?

Life happens

like a house that speaks.

 

In its many leaks.

I listen in the night to noises

that might be unspoken words,

in the pressing of the walls

and a silence of my own.

I’ve grown yes, I’ve grown.

And ripeness is all.

 

The house speaks.

And maybe I am bound

to love the unknown.

I am perched on my own

edge before the fall.

PLEASE POSTPONE ( after Dylan Thomas)

October, the retreating
into red and orange, into mulch,
into the glow before the earlier dark.
The long, slow story of the spark.
I was born into an orange-red,
twilight entwined in rustles,
stones of Venice in worn
grey that absorbs the ways
of children’s feet in swarms,
the swaying wavelengths of the world.
I was born into this month
whose glow is quickened into a heart,
my print enwrapped in silent turf,
in the swishes of a last undergrowth.
In mother’s anxious whispers
and father’s throbbing shouts
and the rippling washing lapping
of rising tides all around.
I was born into the slow digressions
of rivers converging into
the motherly lagoon’s lap, the soul
that both contains and overflows.
I was born in earnest and in haste
in this long gash of a month
and now, in the familiar waste, on the train
of these thoughts of words like rain
I just stand alone in my own flood.
Let me indulge then, let me say
to the god who well knows how to sway
-go slow towards such a time,
I do not want to hurry towards decline.
Wait for me, even if I sit in fake gold,
let me tap all memories on the threshold
that can be thrilled and slowly enthralled
while I try to distil some eternity in my fold.
Forget me, forget all about my end
and with airy nonchalance postpone my bend,
you know anyway I’ll become bones,
and all time will come anyway,
but now please postpone.
 
October 13th 2013.

LAMPEDUSA

 

Praise sirocco again

despite all the tiredness it brings

when the sea is an open throat

and perspiration streams

and the waves’ arms grind swarms.

When it comes, this haze like blinding ash,

it settles at once, the slow thick surf

spreading and sinking the heart.

Hear the burying desire of the desert

and the heat’s gaze, the loitering in eyes

of bottomless pomegranate seeds.

Remember the tall skinny dogs

standing up slowly and walking along

and lying back down, whole bodies stretched

on the broken stones of the pavement

of a Sicilian island street, in the heat

of the noon sun and the strip

of an ink shadow of a yellow wall

where chinks and cracks reminded

of simple exhaustion and eternity.

There we bought rolls of rice and anchovies

while sirocco was blowing its huge

sheets from Africa, the multifarious wings

brought to earth, in scratching

blades of light, delivered

by the ever pregnant sea.

 

I wrote this poem about ten years ago with in mind my visit to Lampedusa in the summer 1986. It's a place of hope and tragedy for many people from Africa now. How different in the '80's :the only person with a black skin I saw there was an American soldier from the US base stationed on the island.

DOG HAIKU

 

Walking on the street

you pat a dog you meet, sweet…

Much harder with the humans.

THE POET'S LINES

 

I have just quoted them,

to a colleague sitting by,

during the teachers’ assembly,

that was trickling on as ever

in ferocious bureaucracy.

Now they are still shining silently

against the backdrop of normality.

 

Maybe summoned by a force

that’s not ours, behind the clamor,

in the fundamental silence,

they can always speak

with the suddenness of eternity,

like a thunderclap turned inward

and beyond.

HAMLETIC DISCIPLE

Life is a rope
which you pull and relax,
it is often a rough rope,
you relax because
it is bruising your skin.
Which with time
it bruises anyway,
from within.

But what is happiness?
Please don't tell me,
do not brandish this sword,
do not waste any further word.

SEPTEMBER

                               after “ June” by Dermot Healy

 

Leaving the openness of summer sea.

The borders shattered in the swarming sun.

 

A narrowing busy light

is now alluring you in its might.

 

It’s river, purpose, direction.

And you feel drawn

 

into the rust-like beckoning

of the withering cornstalks,

 

tall ruins standing and fluttering

on furrows awakening walk,

 

land back on land

and dust in a straight gust

 

along the shiny rustle of crows.

DON’T GO AWAY

Gull, don’t go away,

stay here on your rock

at the end of the dam,

I won’t come near,

I know one step forward

would make you leave,

your time is a bright

taut string, seconds

tight and alert,

your gaze keeping clear

that verge before I merge.

CLANDESTINE

When it’s a feeling.

Of being smuggled into yourself,

for a temporary ( sorry) eternity.

Looking for bits of bits, yourself,

rummaging with papers on the train,

having exhausted any chance

to sense poetry in being blown in the wind,

but having exhausted maybe even exhaustion

and, what after? Going on rummaging

with the badly folded papers of yourself

on the train, while it clanks to heaven

whose door was closed time out of mind,

while you have been frowning, smiling too,

fumbling through lives, scrutinizing

illegal corners popping up in the famine,

the subtle famine of feelings, of being really here,

a few papers of yours fumbled on among chores,

and air blown from chinks by your elbow

on the swarming away-countenance of the train window,

in your disentangled sameness ( sorry) of days,

an eternal mobile vibrating, past-caring in the pocket,

the dream of a touch-screen flashing, forlorn,

in the business of silence,

in the queue from absence to absence.

 

Having lost all ghosts. You,

just unasked, undue.

So simply, so normally uncared-for.

On the many roads.

On the death of Seamus Heaney

I received the sad news on the train via sms yesterday. I never knew him personally, unfortunately, but I think I read almost everything he has written and I feel as if a friend had died. Now even a poem on his death has appeared in the blog Eyewear...

I want to remember him in many ways and with many, many of his lines,
 but a line in particular is the first that has embodied for me his tremendous poetical force...from the poem Mint:

Let the smells of mint go heady and defenceless
Like inmates liberated in that yard.
Like the disregarded ones we turned against
Because we'd failed them by our own disregard.

DUST

Master of contrast,

a hazy, drowsy shine,

light-grey, almost white

on mahogany wood,

but once wiped away with

an ochre cloth from the screen,

it turns into black dirt,

time’s perpetual birth.

Master of stillness,

accumulating as pupils

of the passing days.

They told us,

and it’s ever so clear,

it’s what we will all turn into,

re-turning I think

to the time when we flew,

before coagulating

into this momentary

substantial mess

in which sometimes

we manage to keep flying,

nonetheless.

THE GRASS OF DESIRE

 

In these green fields I am alone,

far from home,

well, not an unfamiliar place by now,

nor I am really alone

but once more with a dog-

dogs, the chance of many a road.

I’m walking her, a favor to friends,

she is friendly and obedient

and walks almost on a straight line

on the path of the lawn.

Gusts of wind make

the oaks and lime-trees sway,

a swarming of branches we gaze at,

I sit on a bench and she walks around

sniffing life under swollen clouds

in parade on patches of blue,

spreading their own pageant hue:

billows of silence and aloneness

with a touch of anything up there

and, despite anything, the grass

of desire, the forwardness.

A dog going on sniffing

while the sky blooms

busy with travelling clouds

with, behind, the sun’s gaze,

now a mellow blaze,

a mother-of-pearl light-grey,

welding here onto away.

PREDICAMENT

I can’t stop imagining

the thousand ways

I could meet your gaze.

Imagining. Imaging.

 

With splendid and persistent wings
that illude me I can pull life’s strings.
Then, nature.
As gorgeous as the wings. But crueller.

Like a desert, or dark winter,
the impact of real things,
that is what simply might come to pass,
“nature’s changing course untrimm’d…”

Like breathing your gaze, a shattering silken strain.
A blue laser of beauty that I have to sustain.

 

 

This is one of the two sonnets I have ever written. With a rhyme scheme a bit faulty, so it's "almost" a sonnet. But I put it in blog since I wrote to A Cuban in London I would do that. (Maybe this poem appeared in this blog in the past, I am not sure.)

Thanks to a comment of his to my previous post I have discovered his really remarkable blog: "Un Cubano en Londres".

AUGUST HOLIDAYS

 

Where do you go?

( Almost a compulsory question.)

Away for some rest.

Away.

 

It’s when everybody is away,

even if they are at home

they are away.

Tourism.

 

And on television

documentaries on travels,

entertainment only,

jokes, fun, catch and run,

 

each evening the circus,

the playful clowns

who spit and shout

and never drown.

 

Lightheartedness, a must

you deserve at last.

 

At last?

And how was it at first?

 

( Not a question now

to trust.)

Venice Lagoon

My work "Notes While Travelling Across The Lagoon" will be published in late autumn by Ginosko.
It seems that when I write setting my lines on the Venice Lagoon the work is, more easily than others, accepted. I say "the work" because in this particular case the "Notes" are part prose-poetry and part a poem. They are about a setting and feeling, particular of the heat and dampness of Venice that embody the basics of its soul I dare say. This year in particular heat and humidity seem to give very little respite and continue with a constancy making one's back become the microcosm, or the living miniature map, of various rivers' deltas.
Sweating while walking becomes a daily toil and air conditioning more and more indispensable. Fanning oneself, even though still predominantly a female act, especially with a proper fan, ( why?), is what you increasingly notice.

FACEBOOK

A waxing and waning of words
but not at all with the regular rhythm
of the phases of the moon, moon that
once gazed at
makes you wish to witness a sky breath
and the transparency of the soul,
not that balance between what
is active and passive in the gaze
and gives words only the role of a shade
whispering around, like fingers
that nod at the currents
and the wavering nuances of the haze,
not at all the tune of this digression
and not in the least the force
of any meditation,
just words worming, clustering,
like gnats splattered on a wall
by a gust of wind, then scattering,
then returning attracted by a halo of heat,

words following an order anyway yes,
the order of the scroll,
you roll and roll,
proceed in the list,
try to be smart
or worse, wise
and talk like
in a square they say,
and you feel free
to reach the whole world
with your opinions on the scroll.
Free...partcipating
in the buzzing words' bees?

This was a blank page once upon a time,
like the image of a silent stare.
Spotless. Unknown.

CORMORANTS PASSING

 

In front of the causeway,

in the haze and heat,

they dash on a straight line

skimming the water-skin.

Jet black, jet speed.

Impressing themselves

on the horizon’s veil

for a few instants, then

fading, not leaving a trace.

Transiting? How fast? 

Idle curiosity.

They are just

fast. And neat.

Precise in the heat.

 

Like the shine on some

crabs’ armor, here

on the stones nearby.

A few crabs staying still

before scuttling back in.

A few seconds' shine

for a few instants welding

immobility and speed,

like the heart in silence,

like the Gods

who have no need.

OLEANDERS

( After  Robert Frost )

 

Long gardens behind the sea,

grass, then stones before the waves

that are nothing now in the early

morning of this summer day,

in the quiet washing of the ground swell,

the low, vast shuffling.

There is a distant little bell ringing

on the horizon’s open well

with that hint of a haze like a mind

resting in its own breath.

And there is this full, sweet

aroma in the gardens, a lingering

you have fed for ages.

expecting a myriad of stages.

Anything fulfilled?

Oh, it’s too vague and too great to tell,

songs spread like the ground swell

and have been seeping, seeping well.

And are still here, here and untold

after a whole life’s lull

and all the ghosts’ gold.

GHOST

I’m sure you have just passed by

and I missed you, in the shuffling,

there’s too much crowd in the house,

I am moving for now or maybe just

dreaming to be moving, I feel

reassured not feeling my own self

as solid as I believed once.

Things and beings are cast about

like slings, Hades behind the shades,

your things, our things, items

in dust and sun that can last

often more than a body can,

like handwriting, the flourishing

of a spirit though the pen.

Yes, they are handling with care

your cups, your favourite teapot,

the pictures with the ebony frames,

those above the sofa with the worn out

patterns of flowers.

There’s still the blue Aga,

too massive, can’t be moved,

I know you were passing near there.

I’ll be back in the summer...

no furniture? You know I don’t mind,

I’ll get a camp bed. I’ll be

in the kitchen, at the window,

with the crickets.

It will be just a short step

sensing the swish of your breath

and, filling the waiting of a night,

the starry buzzing of your outlines.

 

This is the poem I have, more than any other, revised and changed. In the years probably a different version appeared in this blog. Maybe it might be in tune with the theme David King refers after his latest posted work.

Getting published

I found at my door this morning two complimentary copies of the magazine The Meadow from Truckee Community College, Reno, Nevada with my poem "Coming This Far" in it. It is a poem born in a sort of ranting or rambling atmosphere in this blog almost two years ago, a poem, revised later, written in the same months in which I wrote "Letter To The Devil" and other works which I thought would have very few possibilities of being published for their longish, a bit chaotic message.
Well, this was published. When I saw it in the magazine I felt what for me getting published most definitely is about.
This: "Well... at least I haven't talked only to myself!" The most ever present risk.

SANDBARS

You like going further down into the naked horizon

beyond San Francesco del Deserto’s tight greenness,

the rich garland of cypresses staring at the light,

beyond the bare squared top

of Torcello’s bell tower, towering

in the middle of its nowhere.

You like beyond where there’s nothing more,

patches and patches of water, mud and grass

and the mellow silence of mauve flowers

and low waves in thin fingers of breeze.

The opposite of mountain peaks and high seas,

here nothing needs to fall or climb or rumble

and you taste in the air the rest

and fulfilment of the expanse of shallows.

Walking on water could be a gentle feat

and gently, in the labyrinth of canals,

the egrets’ still whiteness invites you

to fade in a reeds’ rustle while you breathe. 

TWO WINDOW HAIKUS

Silhouettes of pigeons,
wings flash, a busy transit,
life's core by my window.

Window wide open,
I like the wind disposing
of the papers in my room.

THE GRANDFATHER CLOCK

A light-green wall I remember,

in the kitchen of my first world

with the pendulum in its box

and hear the large ticking,

the beating out of earth and air

in the spreading summer afternoon.

Time. Time passing, swarming.

Now like then, with this electric

clock in the kitchen, its present stare,

now like then, the spacing of seconds,

even if that other ticking was fuller,

light leaning on airy fingers,

waving with shadows of leaves.

Time. The stare of the beginnings,

afternoons like unending plains,

the fields of grass stretched

in shivers of swirling heat,

in a buzzing entering your heartbeat,

in the flooding sun’s gaze

and the clock beating the regular

instants of its own age.

An age of parents and grandparents,

dignified, moving without pressure,

along the furrows of a kitchen garden,

on the plains where time

has never wanted to leave,

on gravel roads and shiny dust

and the swishing crowds of cornstalks.

Family. Everybody gone now

and time’s countenance just essential,

time’s fist leaning on its cheek

in the rhythm of its own reverie

that is just a passing and being here,

always full and ungraspable

and simple, simple like this ticking

accompanying the pen on the paper

and, outside, the wavering

fingers of a birdsong.

The ticking so at one

with the body of silence

beating out like a stare

filled with buzzing bees,

so interwoven with the texture

of this insubstantial pageant,

so close and ours, both a same

and further sea.