HIGH WATER WIND

Sirocco. That is after all Venice’s breath,

that’s her, that vast belly underneath swelling

and surging, close to our belly.

It is dangerous and known and dirty,

it embroils our soul.

Feel the gusts, they are low, you sense

an exhaling at your legs’ height

like eyes rising from the stones

and pushing you on.

Then the sirens’ sounds, no, not mermaids’, although

there’s a final touch of new notes lately,

a reverberating mellow trembling,

then you sense the city’s lap lapping and swelling

and waters keen on filling the gaps.

And plasters and bricks gnawed

by huge tongues churned out of

the perspiration of the deserts.

You slosh your way, your life

along the walls, while the city’s heart

stares and floats.

And asks you

to keep floating too.

"HOPE"

It cuts into time like a sword,
it is for sure the best word,
an open "o", sliding into a "p" after a "h",
shoots our desires straight away.
Think, even if you take the final "e" off
at "hop" all the same you can't scoff,
at its marvellos jump:
your frog that doesn't need a ramp
and leaps and flies and lands
wherever her windy god intends.

Hers is hope before hope my friends.

ON THE BRIDGE

 

Railway and roadway over the waters.

Here, way forward and way back,
the perpetuity of passing.

Here, where I have been gazing at life and waves,

at their intent in their frames.
Familiarity of the unfathomable.

Scrutinizing a picture whose rims

remind of a longing

or long for reminding

of a whole I am not

given to know.

The train slides on.

Crisp, low waters at this side now

while the sky seems to prepare a snowstorm

with its pregnant, steely grey.

Now the train stops

in the middle, the eternal middle way,

and is buffeted by currents, life’s sides,

by the wind’s always so present and invisible ways,

on my left a cormorant is skimming the water crests

and on my right I sense the severity of a gull’s gaze,

space is the same while being infinite and precise.

I gaze at the jagged lines of the mountains on the horizon,

-I have always been on a crossing, on life’s waves.

Yes, I am saying nothing new but I say it.
I am alone with my sense of a vast mute lore
and nobody to bore.

No difference between the wind’s currents
and those of my heart and mind,
everything on this waving line.

 

 

Gliding on thoughts that are waters.

Waters and thoughts.

And in a moment among the moments,
in their brimming, busy, buzzing infinity,

with a light push, life’s nod, or a god's,

the train at last moves on.
And the low waves beckon
towards brambles and sandbars.
Shapes like monologues
that catch and forget stars.

DEAR ON-LINE FRIENDS

Or blog friends.. some of you email friends, sometimes I wonder if we are all

nothing but voices, written voices basically.

 

Only two of you I met once in separate circumstances and places.

One looked young in her voice and looked small and sprightly,

her words on the screen had painted that picture of her to me.

The person I met was tall and imposing, not a sprightly girl but a great mother.

And the other…

well, for a year, I thought I was going to meet a man, that name to my ears, Daniel,

sounded male. Fortunately I came across the photo before the meeting.

A young woman, in the photo ,a young, loud, enthusiast woman ( and” man” before…I had to adjust my feelings..) and in the words.

But time had passed, the photo was old, she was now a gentle lady in her middle age.

And her voice: her words  had painted to me a thrilling, loud tone. None of that. None.

Her voice was instead solemn and sober and low.

 

What a simple gap, what a clear wide gulf between a voice on a screen

and an actual human being.

 

Is  this all too obvious, close to the famous “nothing is what seems”?

 

Allow me now to conclude with a quote

that can or can’t be, an appropriate note:

 

“Between the idea

And the reality

…..

Falls the Shadow.”

 

Maybe no gap is ever too obvious.

BEFORE SLEEP

 

It is silent inside,

it is my room and the room of your absence.

Spaces can suspend themselves

in time, with what is and what is not.

It is silent outside too,

in the darkness before midnight,

except for the whining of some shutter

getting closed. And the buzzing

of a ship engine.

We need these reassuring noises,

we need the close, light throbbing of the air,

what makes silence never absolute.

I let the heat of my duvet

sail with the silence, I let

myself slip in my cloud before sleep,

in the jumble I am going to slide in.

Each night I wish myself

to find you there,

in the busy dark

that I want to trust,

a sea where your eyes wait,

where whirlpools will embrace me

quietly shattering

the body’s boundaries.

THE WASTE STATION

A little snow has stuck to the ground,
the stones in between the sleepers
are brown and black, with that
foamy white shine making them look
both rich and forgotten, buried and lost.
I am in the waiting room, I have time,
( but it's not "time on my side", it has gone
or I have gone too far beyond )
I am beginning later today and for once
I prefer to wait here
despite the estranging  atmosphere.
Rhymes can help, like:
the loneliness of the waiting room
is so eternal that goes beyond doom..
well, I smile, in the meantime.
But it's certainly in this place
that the land and time and a cold day
can shatter a heart
dumping a whole being in a silent dump.
Let me tell you once more
of Mr.MacCabe who stumbled on a slope
and froze there to death, while sitting, in the snow.
I could sit here for ages
and keep writing on my snowy blank pages
and forget myself in the waiting room
and be forgotten.
You, "hypocrite lecteur", are you
completely sure you won't share
with me this thought?
A train has just stopped,
the doors are closed, I don't see
any traveller in it.
I gaze at the stones and the patterns of snow.

AT THE TRAIN WINDOW

These patches of land passing, running,

thoughts thriving with them,

brown, green, green, brown, green…

patches like thoughts that, to be sincere,

do not vary much, come and go,

very similar to one another, a grid,

a web, a thread, or a texture, the mind’s pasture

or heart’s filaments, or the thronging

of what we  might even call soul in our retina’s jungle.

Oh, stop blubbering, just admit

you feel surprised, even though only mildly surprised,

since you have been accustomed to that so much,

at how extensively you are trapped

in the thread, in the web, in the patches.

Brown, green, green, brown, green…

and the occasional glisten,

the thin, once in a very while,

punch of bright light.

Or is it just another trick of your mind?

Heart inventing some warmth to keep going?

The fields flash, dash.

And thoughts throb in their threads.

This is what I know
but it goes unsaid

that I would like to know more, more.

Call it the wish of a why,

the wish that keeps me alive.
While the fields fly.
Brown, green, green, brown, green...

 

A SNOWFALL IN VENICE AT CARNIVAL TIME

Long, large gowns dragging white mulch along with their hems,

eyes darting ritual sparks behind masks in swirls of white,

another whirlwind of picturesque laughter for the umpteenth postcard home,

while corteges of masks strew on, strew on, it’s their task and song,

gazing, disguising, cruising on this very life’s lace surface,

I wonder..( wondering is what I have been doing most as a ghost-host)

I wonder if faces love just being hidden at all costs

or if they would rather prefer being definitively lost…

but it’s this white quilt rising underfoot that recalls the last hiding post.

KINGFISHER

The day was calm, the sea still like a salt marsh.

Everything still, its short perched body still

on the tip of a stone along the dam,

a cluster of still dots around the blue back,

the orange breast and the long beak.

Just before spotting it you had been stopped

by stillness itself, sand and air

in their absolutely settled vast velvet.

One step closer and it flew off

skimming the water-skin, a silent

straight line of fast beating wings.

All sounds were muffled

in this day of low, glowing haze,

so you could say it was in the air

the praised pace of those lines

-At the still point of the turning world…-

with the simple shiver of a truth beyond words.

No wing then answered light to light,

the colours of its body would retain it all.

But you sensed all the same

the mute fullness that makes the world turn,

the heart of stillness where the gaze

ready for marvels just waits.

 

 

It was always on the same beach and several years ago now. Something always seemed to happen there giving me a poem.

FURTHER PICTURES OF LONELINESS AND BEYOND

 

i

February, from the train window

clouds of pregnant, pearly grey,

a snow shower. Not much later

on the horizon a gash of blue.

What is more riveting than this space

imbued with boundlessness

and the word “away”?

 

ii

Great illusion of emails, blogs

and faces on a screen, crowds

jostling in bodiless mess,

browsers brow, surf, cruise,

taste the spray, no use,

voices and faces are vacuumed

simply away when you switch off

and what remains? Your cheekbones

in the heat of silence and a gaze

gazing in its own gaze.

 

 

iii

This story is so strange, so unique,

so utterly convincing in its own

being a freak.

From the silence of the horizon

you  bounce now into the busyness

of the page, or you were already

lost in both. After silence and word

your belly burns, like with fire and ice,

fingering the page maybe you are

already erased.

 

iv

Bless my nothingness.

Maybe I am already in the afterlife.

But spring is vast and earthy.

And I am so utterly conquerable,

a bit of a whiff of wild garlic

will be enough.

And I will soon look for frolics

in the splendid inconsequential

grass.

GAP

 

Cycling towards the grey rooms and grey tables

and thinking about the final questions I am going to ask you

in a morning that’s going to be full of words and silences

and those same crumbs of knowledge woven with tension,

I skirt along a meadow of tall trees:

the early morning is cool like no rule after the night’s storm

and I am breathing the mountains and something farther, farther off and here,

the most open sky, the most sincere...

 

and yes ( I think- my soul wheeling with the wheels) I know, I know, I know well,

it can’t have anything to do with anything anybody today must tell

although it’s the only Whole on which now and ever I would like to dwell.

 

 

This is an old poem I have translated, or rather rewritten, in Italian, along with two others, for a colleague, about school. Working on it in Italian, as it had already happened with others, led me to produce some consistent changes in the original English version. So I can almost say I've got a new poem now. Maybe more "Alexandrine"...but never mind!

BLOGGER'S BLUES

 

Dear oh dear,

hear,

 

I want to be frank,

you need to be powerfully drunk

 

to dig back all the rhymes you have lost

and can’t get now to this post,

 

they have been so fast,

flashes in the bloody bright dust:

 

time, the whole time seems to have perpetually missed them

caught in the buzz of its own ticking phlegm

 

that in the end tells you to shut up, give up any strife,

you already knew, didn’t you?, this is just life,

 

it had already warned us, unsheathing his sword:

“the word within a word unable to speak a word”.