Monday, April 29, 2013

MOBILE

On the train, early in the morning,
you sit on your seat,
very alone.
It’s so clear on such an hour
your being alone,
on the day’s bare bone.
So you start fumbling
with your small glass
portable home..
touch, touch, touch,
slide and touch,
so much.
This screen, the moral
at your disposal.
This smooth log,
this starlit
bog.
 
Slide, slide on
this shiny pool, dear,
no matter how far off you are,
no matter how astray,
slide and touch, it’s clear
you are not dead yet, or so you say.

Monday, April 22, 2013

BOTTICELLI'S MOMENT

All right, winter kept us warm
with forgetful snow
but it’s clear now we can’t
forget anything, it’s clear
that forgetfulness is
the wild geese
we remember,
while we wave
and then merge
with this flowering,
memories of the first
sun of ours, where we
have never stopped dancing,
seeing, though
veil after veil,
skin and sky behind..
we can’t be quiet then,
we can’t keep silent
and no layer
is forgetful enough,
earth is our best
transpiring stuff,
our bright, spangled
aftermath,
hear our shuffle,
let our veils brush you
while we stare and soar.

Sunday, April 21, 2013

PIAZZALE ROMA

 
Not saying goodbye to each other, not yet..
I have always enjoyed lingering
a little longer, waiting for a while,
knowing more and more
that it always comes, the time.
On a spring evening, talking about
what’s really important in life,
what must be pursued, longed for,
discovered, grabbed, held tight.
And set on a long, bright path.
A flowering lane.
 
Finding, for the last minutes,
a new wooden bench embracing a green patch
on the asphalt where cars wait,
where a world shakes hands, pats shoulders, waves.
“Until next time..”
 
And we, saying that there is no time,
and one is always getting older…, we, just
assessing the obvious, but never too obvious…
 
being in April at last, on its sweet blade,
cherry blossoms cheering the air
in its swishing, spread-out stare…
 
and they are just over there,
(I am almost pointing them to you,
the horizon being now so near)
the wishes waiting for their
wisteria moment,
wishes spoken and unspoken,
just spawned and sparkling
in their alluring tasks,
their calls like the swallows’,
trimming shrieks in the air
in the lengthening dusk.
 
I say to you then “Bye, have a good evening..”
feeling conscious and lost 
in all the day’s final rustling.
 
“Until next time..” Another spring then,
with a haze to long for..
saying to it an umpteenth yes
 
and earth in slashing greenness.
 
 
Piazzale Roma is Venice "Bus Station", the place, in a way, at the beginning, or end, of the city where cars and buses arrive and can't go any further.

Friday, April 19, 2013

COMING THIS FAR

 
The hour, early afternoon and vast light rain.
In the solitude of the cabin, shingles
rattling in the slightest gust of damp wind.
It’s still going to be a long Easter day, assessing
silence and everything that can’t stop resurrecting.
It’s strangely alluring because it’s so unavoidable
trying to balance one’s own tips, finding
a temporary but wholly satisfactory “that’s it”,
poking honestly one’s own inner peevish gutter.
The shingles twinkle in the light silver drops.
Among the droplets crowding your heart’s view
and the echoes: “after coming this far what
will you ever do?”
The wave crests, the foam, the crumbling
tigers’ ghosts rolling forward, perpetual Prufrocks
looking for revenge, resurrecting in the trench.
Are we made only of fragments?
Syllables and bodies waiting and then transiting?
Various Vladis and Gogoes sitting on shingles
in a lull in between the rush hour and the night?
With the tree so suddenly blooming into spring?
Blossoms blaring and our hearts, as ever, late
shuffling onward after being stuck on our
cobwebs of crossroads?
Or it’s just a lie, the Golden Age, this
lighting of fools to the dusty all that.
Maybe it has always been like this, the bedraggled
director of the orchestra trying to arrange harmony
out of an improvised accolade of violins
while scrutinizing the canopy of rain at the horizon,
the tigers flaring the longing torches of lost reigns…
oh dear me, dear me…how badly I would like
to get settled in longing, accepting
the twinkling lure from down there,
surfing the Trades, in sleep and prayer.
 
Maybe I already posted this in the past. It's one of those rants in the wake of some voices from past masters, with Vladimir and Estragon in particular in mind, these powerful inventions of Beckett's, the two characters the poem I found in David King's blog brought back to my mind.

Tuesday, April 16, 2013

FLAMBOROUGH, LIGHTHAVEN

The huge window connects you
with land and sky,
a stretch of still dry winter grass
and trees and shrubs until
the horizon and the sea behind,
a picture of waving lines
settled in their own flourish
in widespread permanence
with clouds that are
present as a wholeness behind the glass
claiming most space ( it’s their right),
claiming and obtaining wholeness,
the picture of a staring breath,
what you find yourself staring at
with no particular plan in mind,
with no purpose for once, nothing
to forward or realize,
you are just mutely drawn into the stare
and you stand and watch over there
the fat woodpigeons, two alert deer
and some cruising wild geese,
the moment’s lease,
the space where this is what comes to pass
behind a frame of double-glazed glass,
a further pageant you have come across,
the world transiting in transfixing nonchalance
with you and me, the living and the dead,
transiting too, in thread after thread..
and all the rest goes unsaid.

Monday, April 8, 2013

PRIME

Subtle and sprightly
spring’s fists,
they are there
in the fields,
like tight stares,
branches in shades
of rose and white,
earth’s prime,
apple, peach
and cherry flowers,
these the brightest,
sparkling under the rain,
telling that even if
you have been torn
inside for so long,
you can’t stop wishing
to be born.

Friday, April 5, 2013

SPRING, ISN'T IT?

Still, stilettoes of snow
shot from the sea,
the winter’s tail on the rampage,
night crossed by
whooshing swarms
of needles of ice.
But now it’s morning
and the huge window
is flooded with light
reminding of an already ripe
midday in the sky.
I look at the time, six a.m.,
just dawn, surprise.
Spring, isn’t it?
I go back under the sheets
gazing, on the window panes,
at spring’s sweet pains,
the longed-for cruelty
of buds and soft rain,
memory and desire’s blades.
And I am plunged,
sensing the umpteenth “nevertheless”,
into the sun’s weaving wishes,
our bright mess.

Tuesday, April 2, 2013

BEMPTON CLIFFS

Busy vastness,
wind a blade
unframed,
its Anywhere
hits,
its palm passes
and stays,
reddens your skin
and the flimsy trim
of your being.
 
Shrieking
rocks’ cheeks
and gliding wings
popping out from just
underneath.
They hang, they go
while you…
well, you are cold now,
you must leave,
must go inside
for some warmth,
a coffee, a chat,
leave, leave
the wind, the birds,
the horizon and
the breathing Beyond
in its parenthesis. 
It’s what you must do,
it’s normal,
in order to live
you leave eternity.