THE TEAPOT

It’s old, that’s for sure. Old silver.

I don’t know how old and where it comes from.

Maybe it belonged to your mother or grandmother

who are now no more. And you are no more.

It stands on the kitchen table, in the sea jumble of it

like a lighthouse on its rock in a sea storm.

I unearthed it one day when my small one broke,

I unearthed it from down under in that huge

cabin of a cupboard, the hoard house you left me.

It looks regal to me, a silver acorn on the lid top

in its rind like a pedestal, like those on gravel paths

in the mountains among pine needles and dirt,

like one of the many thoughts scattered in the world

we keep treading on.

 

My morning tea.

I like brewing in it.

I love starting my day with it,

as if feeling the swaddle of history,

at once bathed in my memory of you.

Oh, the handle. It gets so hot

I always need something to cover it,

a napkin, my own sweater even,

not to get scalded when I pour.

 

I am gazing at it now and breakfast is over,

it looks alone and great, undefeated I dare say.

I gaze at the darker spots on its metal, a sky

that will outlive me.

Nothing really can be grasped of the soul

but it sings, silently, like on this silver

and sits, while we just pass, on its own sea.

GODS

I still see myself with my father
on that day of another age on the church steps
watching two boys in the distance in the snow-field
fighting, rolling, punching each other.
For the first time I was sensing
how violence can be absolute and scaring
but - never confess - I was stung by envy too,
I was not going to be like those two,
I was just a child attending Mass
being kept apart from the wilderness,
the stark realm of punches in the snow, of raging
breath and reddened skin that doesn’t heed the cold.
They were gods those two and I still fear and long
for the heart of their clash, the flash
of the gods’ arms and hands clasping
each other in the snow, the very moments torn
with their gasps in the sharpness
of the livid light and the yells
hushed by the sky.
Picture that moment.


In connection with David King's latest post and his own connection with with Tess Kincaid and "The Mag" with a splendid picture by Salvador Dalì.

"Tempest"

I was glad I could come across "Tempest" by Bob Dylan on the very day it appeared all over the world even if this day is nine eleven.
We know he loves all things sounding fateful.
Amongst the wonders in this new album the final two songs are really breathtaking.
The one before the last consists in an apocalyptic series of characters described in the Titanic sinking at the rhythm of a waltz. It's a stunning fourteen minute song reminding of Desolation Row and leaving a feeling of continuity with the great sixties and for me then with my adolescence.
The last song of the album "Roll on John" on John Lennon is a moving dirge.

At the end of it you hear even, interspersed in a line, a "Tiger, tiger burning bright in the forests of the night..." And you simply rejoice.

Dylan and his own myth are still at one then as far as I feel, very alive and kicking.

Times are not changing much. Good.

IN THE RED

Cells are fast.
And I can’t
stay too much behind.
Cells love their crowd,
for better or worse.
I can't be but
part of them
even if I pretend,
like many of you,
to be beyond and aloof.
Just pretending we even more
become the proof.
So, red wine
and blood.
In the red, the dark red,
in and beyond strife.
In all the explosions
and all that’s resettled
in the pulse of life.
Red wine always
good for the blood.
A thick red
staring
and flowing forward.
I'm drinking now
and getting drunk
on its stamina of "yes".
On my own Moorish wall.
In the sun of the fall,
evening blood
always taking its good toll.

BELLYACHE

It is travelling with me on the train,
flash after flash of landscape,
it’s like that, tummy protesting
for some excess, too much breakfast maybe
and the unavoidable stress.
In contrast with the great
neat, first sunlight of the day, entering
with a fiery stripe on my seat
like an immediate present from the sky;
and out of the window the blooming countryside,
the pure setting for a yogi
quiet and alert in his mind and body,
a bellyache the farthest thing
from his spotless breathing.

Or why not the opposite,
he would breathe with equanimity
all that might come to pass,
my pain at sunrise and the running grass.


This in order to renew my dialogue with David King and, in his latest post, his poem "The Bug in my Gut,"

WHAT'S THERE IN THE SONGS?

I slide into the refrain.
And ages pass.
The songs fill the seasons
giving hue over hue to their skies,
digging through their layers of grey and blue,
doing nothing but passing like ribbons and wings.
How can wings dig in?
What air can sink in like a stone?
Establish a river?

It’s not the words only,
not only “Blowing in the wind”
and “Like A Rolling Stone”….
it’s beyond the lyrics and the tunes,
maybe even beyond the blue in the blues…

The swish of a breath if you like,
both grasping and volatile
light and persisting like a butterfly.

In the wake of some god’s smile,
look at his eyes, how they follow the tune
inventing a further season’s mood.

ABOUT THE BEGINNING

It has always been alluring
like a blank page.
Like the new pens and pencils
on the first day of school,
the glossy smell of the unknown
in the still unopened books.
And it has always been at one
with autumn.
A paradox in a natural way
to begin when the season’s sun sets
with , in the gaze, the bright reds
of the end of the leaves
and the now earlier enveloping
redness of the evening.

A paradox this beginning
with such a distance from spring,
a coincidence maybe
but it can be connected with blood,
this closeness, this streaming of redness,
at one with our pace and pulse,
growing in our own dark,
this pressing sky and skin
we are stuck on.