Davide Rondoni (Italy)

*

The night is full, see how
this night is full of fireworks

fallen stars in gorges

or on cliffs, at the edge of the city, plains...

Stroke your hand over my eyes,
love,
I still almost discern
the flashes the night tell me,
are they random, pyres of abandon

or scattered cirles of merriment?

tuned in televisions
in sentry camps
or hunkered invaders
who sniff in the bitter chill
and curse the moon's
lovely head...

Does a sort of human desperation
lift them into the void?

or at least the fireworks of some workshop...


**

And there
in the sea's great air
are the bonfires for sailors
or contraband?

an astral body falling
or reflections on predators'
lenses...

How full of flames this night, love
keep a hand on my chest.

What can it be initiating
what can it be writing,

that fire in all of this darkness?


XXX. TVB. (VENTO)

Love at its start and at its finish is not
a sentiment


but in your arrival a restless
fury, eye of cyclones, the dream
of a fossilized gaze
smashed under amber
arrangement of stars
in the air and on your face -

each step a last judgment.

Sentiments change, but not the struggle
between the life that seeks out life
and the life that seeks out death.

Love, hold me tightly, can you feel it?

muted, howling in the streets of Italy
and in what Italy's becoming
among blood's scintillas and rude
waiters
something that knows not your name, and

like a killer, no eyes no past
grazes and poisons all the day's names.

But you love at the start and at the finish
call out to the wind, invent new paths of return
don't leave the these plazas deprived of you

hands on cribs, cars
aligned against the sun
and poems and women, these crazy women

****
In the dark I inflate balloons
for my children
it's nighttime in the house

I lose my breath, they grow
their aerial games,
the threads on which they become acrobats
their water shins
luminescent hair

their laughter issues forth
or holds off, paper decorations
on the walls, and
the colors, loose folds on their wrists, I lose
some air, my chest falls
I'm a bird again

night is a mouth opened
over empty stadiums
a girl
still among the other girls who dance - -

I let go of the balloons, let go
of my children in the dark where the wings
of monstrous things touch them - -

I call name them after old saints: Bartolomeo
Carlotta, Battista, Clemente...
gather into your years
my ever waning ones, breath,
that ony God can provide.

Be lively
and stay in my eyes
that in a smile switch off
before the rooms that
open up to a thousand moons.


Passengers, New York

To be men not destoryers
Ezra Pound, Cantos


Spanish Harlem

Shelter us from this din
for the remainder of the night shelter me

she said squeezing my hands
don't let me go away

she too
has apocalypse in her lovely eyes
all that I have loved
and a cross against her throat -

then she flies from my sight

burning in the rain soaked pavement
the night's blades,
the luminous horses that flee
they give her a cloak of flames, a queen
and so lean, alone


Passengers 1 (Ground Zero)

Here, they's come back to work

they slide their hands under their caps,
loosen their collars, or stare at nothing
beyond the glass doors

one of the first has the name
of a prince: Arturo Angelo
Sereno and the last on the list
that we see, because we see their death
in one place or another, turns to respond if we say:
Igor
Zukelman.

As the tear of fire wells
we are very old
and very alone.
We end up with desert eyes, oblique
luminous.

In withholding a tear
we are very modern
and very alone.


To Oonagh

Mother and Daughter

My mother, you tell me
died young, strange -

Now I see her so lovely
in the diaries you keep finally I can
in this rite
of scattered pages on the pavement
I can know something of her gaze,
cross its seal
blue light and darkness
in the city that blazes still.

You're not like she, she is
within an uncertain and kind chemistry of your love,
sentry at the door
of your daughters' room

you argue silently, she resembles you
and you disobey her...

I observe your assent to her insufferable soul,
she loved you and impelled you
with an incomprehensible smile
from her balustrade body
to the wind's many arms

knowing that you would become like her
and not like her -

and you would have finally
kissed the amputation,
and completed her love

Passengers 2

The men who at dawn climb aboard
the 125th St. train
are sleepy like one
whose life is decided
by the impossible god of cities
a rather lost god
an allah yankee - -

But the ticket-taker is boisterous,
he cracks jokes
with his colorful hat,
he's out of some Christian
play, wandering
in his travels among the restless lights
and the white suns in squinted stares -

As of September he takes the role of the cherub
I see burning
in his clear and concentrated eye
the window's reflections
the start of a day that, no,
cannot herald terror alone...


It's Changing Now


I

My body an incurable party
of words
tonight as well I lift it again
and lose blood, I lose
regard for myself.
Evening of condemnation, still a voice
of misfortune?
- Do not hide Your face,
I say slowly like an old man
but with the look of my son,
it is the only chance
to carry out this difficult task
always in the balance
between the mirror's dispair
and verginity.
Writing is loving, I think while a swallow
darts at the onset of evening,
or else it is lying.
Only this can I guarantee you all,
that which is not mine
and knows no laws.


II

Poetry changes nothing, nothing, you say,
over time,
yours is a work of madness.
Perhaps you don't even say it,
you quickly switch the make-up
in your purse, you go
from one room to the other without watching me
in the door's light, standing, in a tank-top.
I love you in your objections, you don't have
the unctuous and contemptible rigmarole
of an intellectual. You have a radiant
ignorance of the times.
You're wrong,
I rebut without spite
you're absolutely wrong, its gestures
are an immense work -
but don't expect an assembly,
a flagwaving ceremony.
She is never early or late,
she handles
the subtlest of matters,
no use deciding
where virtue borders vice, she works
on the most sensitive of matters.
I think this
as I see the swallow's flight
vanish against the sky
and there begin again -
she is changing her gaze,
she is changing it now.


**********
Women are men's time,
their names a wind that rarely
settles, the kiss recalled
a rose that does not wane.

Their face is a ages-old flame,
the sun's wheel that slows, they are history,
a movement contrary
to the trivial process of each morning,
the dark syncopation
pulsing through blood.

On every occasion
my imaginary hand-kissing
is a powerful courtesy,
almost a fright:
their beauty is time itself,
the eternal ticking in the now that leaves us.


**********
Look how women are,
against them strike
the great violent seas of death.
It is they who watch their husbands
entering into shadow, their children
when they are called.

It is they who remain.

And they pause all life
with one hand on the breast,
it is within their eyes that the soaring
of the days comes to a pause.

It is they who return alone.
And who take one another
hand in hand.
It is they who hammer names
like rocks
and keep
saying a prayer for the world.

**********

What a man or woman can say to the sky
for Omar Galliani's work in the P.P. Museum


I

Don't give me back
what you stole, the last light
the lull, little by little
the exploded tree of the mind

don't give anything back to me
not Rome's evening face, not the moon
that fell on the hideous piazza
opening its arms in that fatal gesture
to the wind's hunger

to all that love that
makes me unhappy and glad

don't give me back what you
wrenched from me, you see:
at the height of my heart I have this hurt
and life shouts into it,
grinning

go ahead and keep everything, forget me
entirely,
don't give it back, better
to end in you
than die myself to myself alone
lost


II


The trees, the trees, the trees
like my
thoughts of you in the valleys
they race, the trees,
in all their forms: prayer
caress, cry, drawings
insignificant or stupendous, lightness
reaching towards a face or bent
over waters.

Opening towards the sky,
and from the sky dominant,
lined
with ineffable care along embankments -

if you see them, as you fly through
my heart, if you
inside the hawk and the little girl, see them
tell me what they are

the trees rejoicing over their own roots
windy guardians of a thousand
scars, the scattered modest
forest spinning kites and breaths,
the mysterious nature that conjures
fear and festivity.


III
Imago pietatis


soft, deadly
blood...

shadow cast by
sky

gesture from a life
crucified, obedient

ruby light, light of fire
birthed again and again -

here are born love and the sky
kind
tremendously


We can only love
the rest is broken, doesn't
count,
appears in the morning
the teacup, an old pine, damp clods, smoke
your breath as you open the icy
car. They might as well not have appeared, not arrived
on the shores of our eyes. And the summer
existed, exists in the warm brown recollection
of pruned limbs,
faces become memories

voices, you cry silent rags -

teeth know what nothing
tastes like, and the forgetting: porticoes
upon infinite porticoes.

We can only love,
tear children happy from our flesh,
speak constantly of loving
drunk, wounded, vile
but with eyes bright as lasers
made of exquisite flowers
the canary in the palm of the hand.

To murmur like kissing the air.

The fragrant sprig doesn't straighten
under the blows of our anger, the gaze
of your son doesn't lose its layer of sadness
though you remove it a thousand times
from his face...
We can only love
until the last hidden spasm
that no one sees
becomes a kind of smile
like in the final embrace
of dying, of descending into water.

The myriad stars will witness, and the winds
that passed once beside
the deep amusement of your bones
will say: he was comprised of happiness, he loved,
or else they'll say nothing, and again endlessly
nothing.

We can only love,
the rest is the sour theater