THE SNAIL

Stuck up on the inside of the shutter,

on my fist floor,

it has climbed and climbed

I suppose, slowly up on another

Mount of Fuji carrying with itself

what’s most holy,

the marvel and endurance

of what perseveres, slowly.

Certainly enjoying the damp

foundations, the mood

of this weather and time.

droplets of lines rising on lines.
 

Now it has been days,

stuck for days, looking like

it has found its own

among the many ways.

I gaze at the glistening

brown of its home,

will it last on the shutter

through the winter?

Well, it’s on the inside,

just  like a gaze staring in

and asking for what

we all ask for:

a bit of lastingness

and praise.

 

I dedicate this poem to my colleague and friend, and poet writing in Venetian dialect, Andrea Longega,  to whom I have first spoken of this snail during the umpteenth tired and tiring journey on a tiresome train back from school towards Venice.

Half amused, hearing about the snail he exclaimed (in an impossible to describe Venetian tone) : “And now you are going to write a poem on it, we can’t expect anything different, can we?”

Digital

  Now at school everything is digital, no paper registers any more. And the digital legal signature. The absurdity is to call it signature when for a signature you generally need a pen with which you produce letters, in other words you need write! In this case you click. You click-sign on your name, No words for that. Maybe an adjective. Ridicule, And another. Insubstantial. The virtual world is more and more a baseless fabric, a sense of no ground under your feet.

A dramatically increased volatility of being. More than an unbearable lightness. Where are we going, in any field, with the progress of digital dictatorship?

I have just sent this text message to a colleague:

 

Digital signature and all,

what can I tell?

An endless fall

into a bottomless well.

EDGE BEFORE THE FALL

 

The house speaks.

Aloneness after lunch.

Ants in between

the tiles above the sink,

the dark and now the light,

the home they’ve found,

a swarming sudden crowd

in their crowding blues,

in this chink of time,

on their own straight line.

I must get rid of them

( what would you do?)

I can’t be covered yet

by crawling silence.

 

The house speaks.

A leak from upstairs

and drops on the armchair

and the dog leaving it,

just annoyed or scared,

it’s the neighbor I learn,

ninety-six, he has messed

with the shower. Who helps him?

I wonder, in this house that speaks.

 

I am alone in it. In my beloved

desert lot. That’s it.

And I am still alive.

I didn’t choose to be alone

( and I didn’t choose to be alive either).

Life happens as it happens,

God knows, or does he?

Life happens

like a house that speaks.

 

In its many leaks.

I listen in the night to noises

that might be unspoken words,

in the pressing of the walls

and a silence of my own.

I’ve grown yes, I’ve grown.

And ripeness is all.

 

The house speaks.

And maybe I am bound

to love the unknown.

I am perched on my own

edge before the fall.

PLEASE POSTPONE ( after Dylan Thomas)

October, the retreating
into red and orange, into mulch,
into the glow before the earlier dark.
The long, slow story of the spark.
I was born into an orange-red,
twilight entwined in rustles,
stones of Venice in worn
grey that absorbs the ways
of children’s feet in swarms,
the swaying wavelengths of the world.
I was born into this month
whose glow is quickened into a heart,
my print enwrapped in silent turf,
in the swishes of a last undergrowth.
In mother’s anxious whispers
and father’s throbbing shouts
and the rippling washing lapping
of rising tides all around.
I was born into the slow digressions
of rivers converging into
the motherly lagoon’s lap, the soul
that both contains and overflows.
I was born in earnest and in haste
in this long gash of a month
and now, in the familiar waste, on the train
of these thoughts of words like rain
I just stand alone in my own flood.
Let me indulge then, let me say
to the god who well knows how to sway
-go slow towards such a time,
I do not want to hurry towards decline.
Wait for me, even if I sit in fake gold,
let me tap all memories on the threshold
that can be thrilled and slowly enthralled
while I try to distil some eternity in my fold.
Forget me, forget all about my end
and with airy nonchalance postpone my bend,
you know anyway I’ll become bones,
and all time will come anyway,
but now please postpone.
 
October 13th 2013.

LAMPEDUSA

 

Praise sirocco again

despite all the tiredness it brings

when the sea is an open throat

and perspiration streams

and the waves’ arms grind swarms.

When it comes, this haze like blinding ash,

it settles at once, the slow thick surf

spreading and sinking the heart.

Hear the burying desire of the desert

and the heat’s gaze, the loitering in eyes

of bottomless pomegranate seeds.

Remember the tall skinny dogs

standing up slowly and walking along

and lying back down, whole bodies stretched

on the broken stones of the pavement

of a Sicilian island street, in the heat

of the noon sun and the strip

of an ink shadow of a yellow wall

where chinks and cracks reminded

of simple exhaustion and eternity.

There we bought rolls of rice and anchovies

while sirocco was blowing its huge

sheets from Africa, the multifarious wings

brought to earth, in scratching

blades of light, delivered

by the ever pregnant sea.

 

I wrote this poem about ten years ago with in mind my visit to Lampedusa in the summer 1986. It's a place of hope and tragedy for many people from Africa now. How different in the '80's :the only person with a black skin I saw there was an American soldier from the US base stationed on the island.

DOG HAIKU

 

Walking on the street

you pat a dog you meet, sweet…

Much harder with the humans.