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.