Tuesday, March 26, 2013

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.

Friday, March 22, 2013

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.

Tuesday, March 19, 2013

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.

Friday, March 15, 2013

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.

Wednesday, March 13, 2013

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.

Tuesday, March 12, 2013

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.

Monday, March 11, 2013

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

Sunday, March 10, 2013

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.

Friday, March 8, 2013

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.

Tuesday, March 5, 2013

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.

Sunday, March 3, 2013

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.

Saturday, March 2, 2013

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?

Friday, March 1, 2013

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.