JUST A PREFACE

Let's try to be slow and steady

in this silence, her silence.

Let's try to sing the wood

with the branches,

in their breath and 

perspiration of loneliness.

Let's try to improvise

another sun and sea

and abandon

the familiar, impending

sense of drowning.

Let's embrace silence,

her silence, let's embrace

the crime and rhyme

of that silence.

And let's dare

bash hush and shush,

and cry high ash

to the sky.

AND SO

And so, the canal

where you fell in,

like a terrible dream…

I pulled you out, you were drenched

and cried and were angry, right,

with the stupid tourist that

for all the carelessness of the world

for her hurry or God knows,

pushed you in.

You, floating there,

what a scare,  

what a preposterous suddenness,

but in my memory you soon were

in a pool of light.

Memory, fear, loss

and the multifarious pools of silence.

But when I passed by the canal,

the green pool of water lightened my heart.

It did, so. Nevertheless it did,

despite the anger after our row the next week,

despite the memory of me leaving

among the whooshing cars.

Despite the cries and the miles

of asphalt between me and you,

despite feeling I could never see you again,

despite the pools of silence,

the sense of  lingering nothingness.

And so, the memory

and the words in this early darkness

and your voice on the phone

and the pools of hours and days

in which I am floating, in a way,

like you were, in the green canal.

Or on the roads upon which I slide

like a whooshing question.

In the pool of this moment,

with  in my heart

the memory of your face.

Your cheekbones I trace.

 In this pool that becomes a sea.

 

And so. 

ZATTERE OLEANDERS

Perpetual reminders.
The red ones, you know, impress most.
But the others too, the gentle
sweep of the rose, the gentle gaze
that rides on and would call upon,
just in case.
They gently twist
in the lulling hints
of their own mist.
They sparkle on a dry day.
And they do not remind
of anything you want to define now,
you just stand in their airy touch
and try to learn to enjoy
not to wish more, not to wish much.

Orbis 167

My poem "Notes While Travelling Across The Lagoon" has appeared in Orbis 167. I am happy of being again in the magazine that published me first fifteen years ago.

IMPRESSIONIST

Gusts. Transiting skies,

while I’m leaving, entering the train station,

struck by brushstrokes

of swollen grey, with that severe

tiger’s stare in the air

and on the canal’s skin a running,

skidding patch of angered ripples.

The downpour, as ever, is biding its time

on the platform, a matter of seconds.

In the meanwhile the electric board

by the railway gives no sign, no time

of departure, it’s empty

like the railway tracks, and the question

in the eyes of a growing crowd, waiting.

You stand by the luggage, I go to the office

for information.

And here I am, by a glass door,

it doesn’t open, I knock, the knocking

is unheard because of the booming thunder I’m sure,

and the downpour that has come, just now,

and we are, as ever, fretting in its roar.

Finally I’m in and ask: “The train?”,

they say “Hang on…”, ceiling and walls

filled by the thunder’s growls,

they check, they phone, and then say:

“It will come. “ “Which platform?”

“Listen to the loudspeaker.”

I leave, you are among a big crowd now,

brushstrokes of glances in the rain,

on the empty tracks, shiny

with shafts of water.

We gaze at the electric board, we try

to intercept the right voice in the interlacing

echoes from the loudspeaker, I tap

the shoulder of a man in a uniform,

“Have you got any idea when…?”

“I am the conductor” he says “it’s coming,

give me just ten minutes.”

The stormy light flickers on his cheeks.

Just give me time. All we come down to.

Time. Brushstrokes of time.

SPRING IN THE JUNKYARD

I am looking at the tree

that a couple of years ago

was only a stalk there, in the corner.

It was a garden once, this space

in front of my kitchen window,

just weeds now, weeds and garbage bags

and a disused fridge from the bar

that closed ages ago.

No noise downstairs then by now, only the forlorn

perspective of whatever might be born.

And this tree, in this small

frame of wilderness, or a reminder of bereavement;.

a tree that’s a tree, three storey high by now,

so lean and tall, beautiful all in all,

the casual allusion to agile limbs

and a nimble life within, an offer

to the sky above.

On the tips of the thin branches

buds have recently appeared

that now are already small leaves

that seem to know what they want:

they gaze at my gaze and tease.   

THE PHOTOGRAPHS

What remains, scraps of time,

some scraps of mine.

There is silence in the hot afternoon,

a still bubble of heat outside,

the motionless pines, inert branches

except for some random sirocco gust,

the dry grass singing, cicadas searing the grass

and sandbar fever on the skin,

by the slow, perennial, marshy green.

Scraps of time.

I rummage the cupboard and find them

in boxes, albums, envelopes,

inside magazines, even in an old wallet,

the leather worn out to a shine,

with the consistence of linen, almost a gauze,

scraps of time that consume and leave you

staring at slivers of light, staring for the soul

or the breath of all burnt gold, the ore-

I start looking at them, time’s scraps,

these pictures of bygone, bypassed existence

of various shapes and consistence,

these faces recurring, a century ago,

the black and white that looks

both essential and elemental

and rich, expectant in a way,

young cheekbones, at their prime,

enthusiast of being there

in their own living rhyme,

with in front what we believe they believed,

a neat plain, a spread of time,

with these wide, thorough smiles

in the present cicadas’ light now,

light of silence in which I keep looking

and find a few, more recent, colour,

here, me and her, I had forgotten these,

probably never seen them before,

and I forget the others at once, I stare

at the simple drama of what

was there and is no more,

I look in her smile for what

I want to last anyway,

I look and look

and sink in the armchair

and sink in the sky.