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.