TEARING

Bora day, straight claws of air

in a breathing swarm on the strand,

you shiver stared at by the blinding sunlight’s teeth.

The world is broken through and sails wide open,

the sky is an almost aching blue that seems

to have never enough of being scraped clean and pierced.

You skirt the undulating line of foam rags,

dried crests bubbling on the hardened sand,

torn sizzling bits swelling in the wind like spun sugar

and with simple jerks cast forth in the roaring

bright emptiness, far beyond all you know now for sure:

your body gaily thrashed forward by the swaying gusts,

your breath and your hammering heart, so close still

and not yet torn apart.

 

It's not raining here but I feel this close to "Storm Brewing", in David King's latest post.

JUST BLOOD

 

It happens, opening a tin,

it’s just an instant and you cut

the tip of your forefinger,

the sharp edge rips in

and it’s at once a gash

and your dark red soul spills.

It was very ready just underneath,

now it seems to escape so eagerly,

flooding in rivulets from within,

keen on staining the world

expanding in any casual Beyond.

It has happened so fast,

the sign maybe of how we can pass.

In a blink of an eye

your astral body looks

smeared everywhere,

table, chair, a trail on the stairs,

you sense the thin

precarious boundaries of your being.

Until you find a way to staunch at last

what is after all just a tiny opening,

maybe less than an inch of a chink.

Touching it you feel the shine

of your most hidden nakedness,

your fundamental liquid nothingness

over the bones, those just a little

emancipated stones.

By then you try to smile

at how it goes unsaid

the fragility of life.

And feel glad enough

discovering you can still write.

Although the plaster on your forefinger

softens the touch too much

and distances you from each key

showing how easily the world can recede.

So, only the old lessons remains,

the only choice on this side:

stay in silence, listen to the river within,
to the closeness of its far cry.

Poetry Course

On the Easter week I am going to attend a poetry course in Flamborough on the North-East, on the coast, of England. It's a course organized by Paul Sutherland, editor of Dream Catcher.
Poetry will be discussed, considered and maybe eventually written. One of the works the course will turn to is "Dart" by Alice Oswald.
 I am anxious and thrilled for that. After months and months of English I listen to only on TV and speak at school with my Italian students now I am going to face the real thing. I think it's not much different from a boy playing for years soccer with his friends in his backyard and at last finding himself in a real stadium for a real football match.

THE HERON

From the train window, I gaze,

at the stretch

where fields get wider

and houses sparser,

and at that

silhouette on the slope by the ditch,

perfect curves,

a living hieroglyph.

I regularly pass and gaze

and in my gaze I catch

these outlines…eternity?

A word so easy to pronounce,

so teasing and restful…

I pass and gaze and plunge

into this sudden permanence,

this regular moment of the grass,

while being

swarmed away.

CHANGE, RICH AND STRANGE.

 

It can happen that you come out of the wood,

( although you can’t know that for sure

because everything is possible and maybe

you have already been swallowed in it

and it’s not you who is now writing this..)

it can happen that fighting against

nettles and brambles you find your way through,

it can happen, but you can’t esteem

if some of that, or all, is only a dream:

the cutlass you heave, the warm rain

the hot gates and all the rest.

Dreams happen, impose themselves

like a casual rhyme,

a sudden dazzling chime.

You come out then, a clearing at last,

you breathe and your eyes sense a shine,

you enjoy the opening, you enjoy space.

the sun has come out with warmth and grace.

But it’s just a clearing, as beautiful

and transitory as this shiver in your feelings

and the wood is going to thicken once more over there

and it’s going to be only wood almost everywhere...

what is this dream going to prepare?

Or is it only the very hard rind of things?

The hold, brush and crust of the world?

Wood going into new wood,

new intricacies from old clearings?

For the moment you just sink

in the grass, the narrow present

might also be soft,

a butterfly alights,

gnats hurry in thickening spirals,

oh, you could fully breathe this dream now, let it swim,

out of joy, out of spite, out of all,

spitting the pips of your tangerine in the sky gold,

letting the sea of grass digress

even if only a moment remains, or less.

Change, rich and strange.

Beetles are swarming, May-bugs,

drunken drone and emerald shine,

you inhale this Kubla Khan of time,

yes, yes, everything changes because nothing does,

you plunge into your heart and merge in the buzz.

DAUGHTER...AND MOTHER

 

Small, busy steps,

up and down the road,

laces undone, I said “careful,

she can stumble on them”,

but mother said almost merrily”

well..if she falls she learns..”

Mother was tough

but daughter not less

and she didn’t fall,

it seemed she would stumble

but definitely stood,

her voice tumbling around,

while, almost unnoticed,

she kept unzipping her mother’s boots..

( once and twice and three times and more

in that child’s eternity I have left behind…)

“Shut up” mother said zipping her own boots back,

with eternity’s patience,

“I am talking to an old friend..”

Mother sounding, like her daughter,

very matter-of-fact.

The climax happened not much later

when mother looked at me

with a great fun in her gaze and said:

“Look at her eyes, see how

she is, just a little, squeezing them,

that’s when

she is pooing.. in her nappy..”

And, instinctively, we at once

turned our gaze away to allow her privacy.

 

A bit later while I was telling mother

the latest calamities of my life

daughter kept trying to intervene

shouting brand-new shouts of strife…

And I felt it, only a little then,

but I feel it fully now,

no matter what, life goes on

and it’s always great how.

HYMNS IN BEREAVEMENT...

This poem of mine, published in this journal, is one I considered it had very little possibilities to find a home. Luckily I found maybe the only possible appropriate magazine which contains many interesting works on the same theme.

http://www.theshinejournal.com/tramedavide.htm

LAGOON LINES

 

The familiar vacant into the vacant,

into pearly light,

sky dots and drops

still and blind.

You’ll never know how much

appeased in blindness,

accomplished in stillness,

they never tell you

and your gaze is accustomed

to let questions hang,

to let answers feel useless.

You gaze into the pearly haze,

at the blurred line that divides

horizon from sky.

A boat in the distance

moves ripples blown along

like piano keys,

like the fugue of a breath on a sheet.

On the tops of some poles by the banks

there are spheres, don’t ask me

about their purpose, don’t ask me

while you are seeing me

in my own pearly, blank sea,

while I am setting free

lagoon lines that gently cry and sleep

in the pool of my own reverie

where I just would like

to forget and wade and glide.

 

Even if it’s not forgetfulness my plea,

it’s the lagoon’s face that spreads and stays,

that points at a fading although it never leaves,

in the pool of a gaze that seems to erase

any distinction between being and not being

while it rests in the unknowing.

So, on the tops of the poles there are spheres

and on a sphere there’s often a cormorant,

head, beak, tilted slightly on high,

breathing the pearly, blind light of the sky,

piercing the blur of dots and drops

and the blurring in the blur of the horizon line.

The water mirrors a smoothness

centred on its own featurelessness

and the cormorant’s eyes are still

although, if you come close, you can distil

a shiver in them, the sharp

infinitesimal spark

of a dream.

WHO NEEDS ARRIVE?

Her gaze in my gaze.
While I am enjoying this book
which is tragic, comic, crazy
but utterly believable, utterly.
While I sense that light in my eyes
and that smile.
The train, as ever, is late
like my country, like life,
there is time to keep reading,
time before arriving.
Time in the meantime,
in which I want to indulge
and wish it never stopped.
On these empty lands where is anywhere?
Who needs arrive?
Fog is clouding the rims,
I am sensing in my veins
its familiar insubstantial stillness.
I just want to keep reading then
and transiting, in the train's roar
that merges with the fog
and all the roars' lore.
I just want to keep reading
and going, her gaze in my gaze,
her smile.
Before I myself become roar.

HEART AND SILENCE

Listen

to its governing by beating

with blood and oxygen

circulating back and forth, to the brain,

sorting out our identity’s subtleties

like thin rain.

Listen

in here, to the hues of feeling

where a redness so readily soars,

in here, somewhere where

we say “innermost” and “desire”

and where it’s so easy to drown.

There is a hush when we really

turn into it, sunflowers turning

their own gaze into they own

stem, petals, head and more into,

more into, more.

Or so it’s what

the masters say, their skin

spiced in sea haze.

Listen

to the beating and its roar

growing inside

more and more

and the masters’ breathing eyes

digging backward inside

beating with the beating,

unhurriedly, obediently,

until they whisper a final

“in here”

and disappear.

READING "FOUR QUARTETS" ALOUD

Inevitable shiver in the voice.

Levity of layers that break through,

every word you could say

when you take a breath during a pause

sounds superfluous, you can only

keep breathing, keep reading,

indulging in this present

from eternity.

FINANCE

Gods in swarming intangibility
their predilection in fluctuation,
protean stares in hidden codes
subtexts, subjunctives, understatements,
tightrope whispers surfing
under layers of glass and plastic
and wires in empires of elastic
hidden, interspersed imperatives
nobody sees but many try to sense,
in the dense amnesias of coincidence,
it’s never clear to what extent they govern
or are governed, exploiters exploited,
stares in lounging huge halls
in a wilderness of screens
taking the air by the scruff of its neck
trimming screams., alarming alarms,
face to face and back to back.
Feel any harm?

DRIP DROP

Drip drop.

 

On this drunken and very alive strand and end

and beginning ( sorry, yes, every end is a beginning).

Drip drop

while I am getting drunk

in silence and with silence and real wine

and while you recede like

The Great Gatsby’s waves

back somewhere, out of reach

but still somewhere I’m sure, each to each.

Drip drop, with your many voices,

electronic mail messages, text messages, and s and s and s...

the reassuring plural.

Spreading out like a renewal,

an always brand-new ether

always enjoying a glorified end, or beginning, of the tether…

wanting anyway to be alive

in this jungle of sprouting and smart spites.

A Drip drop of echoes

and echoes of echoes..that keep making me think:

what are our voices

and what are we, really?

All there is is this

Drip drop into questions and answers

and some of us waiting

for the answer that answers,

in the crowded desert where we are journeying

and elbowing in.

In the clamor of the drunken strand and in the silence

streaming.

 

Drip drop.