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 Alessio Zanelli is an Italian poet who has long adopted English
as his artistic language and has published widely in literary
magazines across the world. He is the author of three
collections, most recently Straight Astray (Troubador
Publishing, UK, 2005), and a featured author in the 2006 edition
of Poet’s Market.--http://www.writesight.com/writers/Zanell
On The Threshold
On the threshold—
where the sick shadow never pauses,
the smiling step accelerates,
the finite instants halt
like frames of a jammed film.
The issuing image—neat,
potent and rumbling
like a crash of thunder—
is inexhaustible sap for the eyes,
undreamt-of salve for the soul.
On the threshold—
that neither courage nor cowardice could cross—
those finite instants become movement,
flowing thought,
a chain of ineluctable events.
Not the measure but the quantity.
Shimmer of light withstanding
the voracity of the darkness.
What lies on both sides of the line
will never be of any importance.
Shining on the untraced threshold—
before completion and beyond expectation—
rids those instants of their finiteness,
thrusts the shadow further,
decelerates the step.
The imagined and the imagining merge,
so do the lived and the living.
The ever-carried-out research to an end—
the threshold detemporalized.
Miracle of eternity.
Absolute Beauty
Nothing real
evades the rule of beauty.
Albert posited it,
many attested it—
digging out a common base
between the folly of relativity
and the sheer absurdity of quanta.
Beauty is the only rule.
Then how is it
that you—beautiful indeed,
more beautiful than one could imagine—
have really nothing real in you?
In fact,
one of the three must be true:
there is no beauty in you;
or else—unreality is the most real of things;
or yet—all those geniuses of matter, space and time
are nothing but madcap visionaries.
First published in The Iconoclast (NY, USA)
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Haunted
Her voice and scent
evanescing ghosts
haunting empty hours
what have I done?
Days at work and evenings home
alone
don’t taste the same anymore
awakenings seem daytime returns to night
everything’s slippery
deprived of volume and colors
like old comics in black & white
only lines
within unchanging squares
how could I reach so far?
Wrinkles
sparse and divergent
useless marks
on my useless face
silence grows old
hands seek in vain
no more vibrations
from the mobile
tomorrows keep on turning to today
but will todays ever turn to tomorrow?
Questions! Questions!
No more time
for the mind’s eye
since I can’t disperse
any of my haunters!
I
uncollectable
soaked in myself
liquefied through the future
she
fixed
neatly shining out
sculptured in the past.
Recall
Granite towers,
sentinels of the past,
warners of these days.
The child phantom
wanders through the hollow,
to collect its fragments
and put them together again.
Back to its present,
as ridges and clouds
officiate the rite of yore.
No sound from the glacial basin,
nor from the sloping conifer forest.
No drifting voice.
No echo.
Everything
makes itself
whisper, word, cry.
Anything ambient
betokens the intangible
and speaks by its appearance.
And the water still runs downhill.\
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