come a me parve

By way of its household reflexes my body surrounded itself with new things: lights & bankruptcies, vanishings & manors painted a difficult rose.

How tranquil the sea! whose waves once fell untroubled against this freshly tarred vessel full with its cargo of fine wares and precious goods, while the air and its winds, hung still; the same Sky who now denies me his noble lights shone clear in those days with a brilliance unhampered by shade or fog. But no homebound sailor should think they are owed safe return for having set out on clear seas:                                                   The unruly stars and cruel fate have since bared their fury, turning against me with harsh glares and storms. Armed with gales, rains and thunder, the Sky looms monstrous above me and rapt to devour-- meanwhile my spirit looks on, ever North.

What sorry state has Love dispatched me to, that Sunlight now were blackness; that the dawn should reignite my longing to again behold my darling Light? That brilliant glare, though magnified between us, blights my eyes and with its radiance blinds. Sweet musics fall upon my ears so clearly, but my heart will only have the din of sighs and sobs. As even now I scour the meadows' green my soul despairing reels--and when I see the boundless flowers, desire again in me blooms for my fair Fruit, whom with but a breath Death rent from me and from that heavy flesh that binds the world and me with so much grief.

When that day comes--when I can no more bear to roam from shore to shore, you'll find me sat, o brother mine, beside your tomb, dismayed that blossomless your days have met their end. Alone now, how our mother wears her age, and talks of me to your unspeaking ash; while I, expectant, clasp at you in vain from rooftops not my own, where still I feel heaven conspiring with the opaque will that squallwise dealt its blow against your life. Now I take to your same untroubled tides to pray, clutching what little hope I've left: Strange folk, though I die, grant that my remains should find home in their mother's grieving arms.

Dove sull’acque viola era Messina, tra fili spezzati e macerie tu vai lungo binari e scambi col tuo berretto di gallo isolano. Il terremoto ribolle da due giorni, è dicembre d’uragani e mare avvelenato. Le nostre notti cadono nei carri merci e noi bestiame infantile contiamo sogni polverosi con i morti sfondati dai ferri, mordendo mandorle e mele dissecate a ghirlanda. La scienza del dolore mise verità e lame nei giochi dei bassopiani di malaria gialla e terzana gonfia di fango.

There on the violet waters where Messina once stood, amid shredded wires and debris you walk long the railroad tracks with your red cap on, resembling an island crow. For two days now the tremors have left us to boil beneath a December of tempests and toxic seaswells. We watch night fall from inside boxcars like calves and count dreams of rubble along with those fallen and bashed in by the wreckage, chewing at strings of dried fruit and almonds. The science of our grief brought truth and knives to our field games of yellow fever, of tertian, of mud-bloated fever.

whose mind did not appear then overwhelmed for having tried to paint you as you seemed where heaven's harmonies make her your shade,

when in that open air you showed your face?

Christmas is a fife of daybreak, frenzy of roots letting loose in your name its sharp ultrasounds. Even the stars hear, those not-quite-blue suns eternally drunk on their pure solitude. Because You are all this, little god who are born and die and again are reborn in a heaven of leaves: a voice who rouse and dissettle the glass and the sea, and the stone, and the unknowable void.

nothing more than the slow fade of all our solitudes into the distance, the softness of gulfweed spanned by a gold bridge reaching into the night.

I am here, illumined by your gift as if by ten stars or moons, dreamily guiding myself by hand to where a faint glow is stirring with fires and lanterns (green and violet), with pinwheels and caffe signs.

Van Gogh, blue Paris… To the right, a pine tree where I’ll hang four nostalgias and my faith in you, white comet posed on top.