ORPHEUS

e non canto e non celebro che i topi
(Sergei Yessenin, trad. Angelo Branduardi)


the muddy day, brewing the weary clay,
clammed all eyelids with remorse
so none sees me anymore

if I shout, if I walk about in the nude,
if I wreak havoc on the civil truce,
it is useless, I’m my one and only witness

names, I ain’t got any (though none asks for it,
what feels the same) and to a fellow nobody
I cede my seat, unless he prefers my own feet

collecting beads from my dried song-spring
to scatter it into the wind is of little aid,
nobody listens or understands such things

following among the blind and the shadows
should secretly fill me up with all those things
I am as always the single one aware of

but such magnificent beauty misspent
in signs we cannot decipher
shut up for meaning just too much -

as the sea silences on the beach
or as bodies quiet down again
after love’s seeped through them

and all the offspring that springs from my tongue
grows up stronger,
steals my gasp and speech,

till they banquet
profusely
on my own leftovers

from now on I will sing only for the joy of rats and frogs,
I leave my words to those who won’t be saved from fire,
and reek and sweat like desire

I pick up my rests,
I’m both the dance of my shreds
and the dead dancer driven over the edge

the music which stood by me,
I looked back but could find but thin air,
yet still miss

another’s voice, another’s flair,
now can you believe this?
I have lately taken to talking to God

LIBRARY

these lined books
are the poor owners
of a sole anecdote
they can’t stop performing

they have hundreds of wings
but even if you tease them
they wouldn’t know how to get started
they are the desperate escape-artists
of a solo number
they can’t afford forgetting

the shelf doesn’t care
to have the eyes in the shadow
and not to manage to read their tales
it knows by hearsay
they don’t have that much to teach
but it likes to display them
as teeth in an arms race

it kind swallows them
every now and then
when a search
budges and rummages
to no result

trapped on their insides
the readers spell
random passwords
out of their shell

and silence is a voice in the head
hovering overhead
like an unremitting stream
leaking from the ceiling
to nobody else's annoyance

PONDERINGS ON A STATUE

deprived of an arm
the statue had its gesture
captured

without the legend in bronze
it had its speech
stolen

if they only could see us, its eyes would keep their quiet,
phantom in reverse that we all can see
but can’t see us in its turn

a second garment of moss
shelters it from the stone cold
which afflicts still nature

its heavy feet trot around time
time our eyes simply can't distinguish
for we can’t meet it from the outside

the statue must also suppose
nothing besides itself exists
and I’m afraid it has a point

one day they had organised
a loud inaugurating opening
but today you won't even hear about it

it seems bound to be less a memento
of the fortune of recollection than another
unwilling tribute to devouring oblivion

and when the night covers the world
and the dreams reweave the threads of the lived
the statue hides from our lights

and goes back to sleeping

SUMMERTIME

with its myriads needles the sun’s tattooed
summer onto city’s skin

clothes sweat on the line
and rotten before growing ripe

the afternoon drops shadows, by nightfall
there are going to be storms

in single rows, motors and mountains
march towards the ocean shine

above a stall of sounds, the day
zooms away

whereas on the stuck trains below hang
the drowned of the damp

and summer is one more passenger,
fat and cumbersome

that pushes and shoves to resurface,
dripping, stinking, gasping for air.

DRUNKARD'S WALK INTO THE BEDROOM

A day, a month, a year are not that far...
If you take one step each day you will near.
Oceans, mainlands ajar are not so far.
Above you, myriad stars disappear
per second (yet sofar so safely far)

throughout this misanthropic multiverse,
and who would give a holy shit? We did
manage to keep all this long way perverse-
-ly sober in a fool´s bliss (God forbid,
if only a She or a He there is),

blissfully innocent thanks to self-poisoning.
Though, as far as we see, all there’s to see
lies beyond understandability.
No use for proud or pseudoanonyms:
will will only get you so far as apathy.

A bed, though wet, could make for it. Just mind
your one big step into unhumankind.
None’s to blame, all things have been so planned by fe-
-rocity − ruler of each single life
or piece of unlife that ever existed.

One step each day, first drop, a pond, then sea,
never being indulged into self-treachery.
Step by step, a habit, as a law, locks us.
... Yes, maybe too far, as far as I see,
for lab rats (like us) skilled in Skinner boxes.

GREENER PASTURES

I also grew up here, among these fogs,
where colors, as rules, dodge and wear away,
although redder than red is still the rage,
and the souls glow much bluer than the blue,
and so the rain falls greyer than the grey.

My father left us, my mother and me,
in one of those veiled chaste mornings,
dreaming of pastures greener than this green.
It was long ago, he must, I suppose
have already built a life of his own,

thinking he’d better not try to come over
and see us back in these valleys, so he
would not disturb the lives we’ve so far lived
in a place we still happen to call home.
True as it is, he couldn’t be more wrong.

Now it is my time to leave for a journey
in which I will fear nor hunger nor pain,
but dread all those blank nights, wishing that sleep
would come instead of a silence repeating
these barren solitudes inside my head.

And I will fear no strangers up my way,
but dread the fierce impression that no matter
how far you get, the journey will outlast you,
that you have come such a long way and yet
no sign of the greener pastures, and yet

no sign of greener pastures.


(october 2006, in a dream)