|
DAVIDE TRAME
Reminder
Dirt on the snow path,
a flash that will stay:
the dark spots of dogs’
and deer’s droppings
that look like seeds – the
latter,
and both clearly reminding
of earth and matter,
splotches of dark
on the immaculate
whiteness,
the tearing sharpness
of the snow’s glare.
Maybe it’s just what we
need:
gazing at our dirt
enhancing mortality
that is dark like the soil,
like the tangle of entrails
in everything, the layers
of dark
on which we stand.
We gaze at them
walking on, and finding
some familiar respite
from the marvellous
estrangement of white.
The Same
The old mother forgets,
we assist at the jumble
in the windmill of her
memory,
there’s this careless,
relaxed,
river of events, muddled up
in a talking that is
endless…
before the war, after the
war,
decades, months, weeks, the
trudging now
in the web of days,
now and then, the same, in
the constant
fading present and our
desperate attempt
at reassembling, with the
shoring up
of reminding.
Nothing new, it’s easy to
foresee
the jumble in the strength
of the incoming tide,
the fading made of many
crumbling matchsticks
and the vast wave of the
debris,
pinpointed but mostly
quiet,
in the oncoming night.
The old mother
looks out of the window
at the morning weather,
when asked she says she has
forgotten
if it’s raining or snowing,
we see her maybe just
attracted by a detail
in a plant, a new red berry
–say,
when in her laziness she
starts to digress
about this new befallen
strangeness,
and maybe a sunbeam in the
meantime
casts fresh shadows on the
lawn
and everything is the same,
present and gone.
Boundaries
The driver has come,
the bus is going to leave,
I sit and gaze at him at
the steering wheel
with the glossy black
buttons by it
and the windshield with its
sheet
of milk-white, swirls
of breath and dirt, the
fog,
always at one with the
workday,
in its skin and constancy.
I’m well within my
boundaries.
Very familiar.
Behind, the historic city-
that by now seems to exist
only to be prized and left
behind-
and in front the factories
and blocks of flats,
the reality where I need to
go,
the winning geometry
of boxes, squares,
rectangles and lines
for those who need to stay
and move.
I am thinking
that time has passed,
that I have less time left.
It’s inevitable to think
about the inevitable.
I look at the windshield,
at the fog that is always
the same,
within the boundaries that
are what I know,
on the surfaces where I
need
to slide and go.
Now the driver is turning
the wheel
with supple arms
while, as it happens,
the fog suddenly rises,
I look around at the same
boundaries,
never the same under a
patch of light.
Skin
Caravaggio’s bodies,
alive and dead.
The here-and-now of their
nakedness,
their luminous closeness.
Always amazing
what’s utterly ours.
The pores and veins’
infinitesimal throbs
and a glow, our glow, that
transpires.
And eyes, eyes that grab
you like cries
and the cheekbones, the
sinews,
that dig at once into the
moment’s marrow.
In the silence and fury
our soul’s presence,
which is nothing
but the body’s exuberance.
I am trapped now in the
normal
marshes’ mud and clouds,
my mind crossed by
those flesh and bones’ grip
and gaze
by which we created the
gods and they us,
when we stared and stood
still
and nobody could resist
the earth and light’s
tendons,
our skin,
piercing the mist.
|
