Wednesday, December 25, 2013

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.

Saturday, December 21, 2013

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".

Monday, December 16, 2013

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.

Thursday, December 5, 2013

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.

Monday, November 25, 2013

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.

Tuesday, November 12, 2013

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.

Sunday, November 3, 2013

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.

Wednesday, October 30, 2013

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?”

Saturday, October 26, 2013

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.

Tuesday, October 22, 2013

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.

Tuesday, October 15, 2013

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.

Tuesday, October 8, 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.

Friday, October 4, 2013

DOG HAIKU

 
Walking on the street
you pat a dog you meet, sweet…
Much harder with the humans.

Friday, September 27, 2013

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.

Friday, September 20, 2013

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.









Sunday, September 15, 2013

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.

Monday, September 9, 2013

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.

Monday, September 2, 2013

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.

Sunday, September 1, 2013

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.

Thursday, August 22, 2013

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.

Sunday, August 18, 2013

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.

Saturday, August 10, 2013

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".

Wednesday, August 7, 2013

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.)

Sunday, August 4, 2013

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.

Tuesday, July 30, 2013

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.

Tuesday, July 23, 2013

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.

Tuesday, July 16, 2013

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.

Sunday, July 14, 2013

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.

Friday, July 12, 2013

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.

Wednesday, July 10, 2013

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. 

Sunday, July 7, 2013

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.



Thursday, July 4, 2013

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.