WERE YOU
(A floating, edible, surrendered body.)
Were you a bird you would surely be an eagle –
not so much for your royal gender
and your blonde hair
but for your beak on my liver.
SIX SYNONYMS OF GEORG HEYM
Large pomegranates
like hearts
with cracks
like afternoons
at the end
of high school.
IDEAL EXECUTION OF A POET
(He preferred the pen and the brush.
The sawed-off shotguns.)
I still remember Giacomo Bletterstam
a frantic fauvist I once met in Turin,
he had a twin-cylinder Vespa scooter
and a naughty monkey from Morocco,
we took trips to wild lakes up in the mountains,
unfenced woods, frenzy brush strokes,
one day in the midst of nowhere I stood by a junkyard to smoke
and he painted the smoke coming out green
from the mouth of his mute monkey
like winter comes off the scooter’s body.
He painted it yellow with a tulip on its lapel
as a gift to me,
it’s the bullet that will get you one day, he said,
because you poets are amasing and indisputable –
you write better from inside a coffin.
In another instance I came upon him at the demonstration slogans
below the guilty factory’s walls,
he did not have the painting with him
but a banner with incoherent blobs of colour,
you are a fascist he shouted at me in the middle of the protest
because you believe in the world you see
(mercy exists but in the impossible).
At a third instance at Easter
he called me to his house where his bedbound mother
had risen to serve us overcooked goat,
we talked about the expressionists
as echoing the phenomenologists,
he knew quite a lot and would mix it with the yellow paint
as it stood there before him in the oil,
eudaemonia... he exclaimed, hedonism...
drawing crosses and monkeys in the air.
I had brought neither wine nor unfiltered cigarettes
and was embarrassed to ask.
In late March I saw his invulnerable scooter
in a dingy, snowed alleyway
(a German lad from Mailand was riding it),
at the kiosk where I asked, someone said he was “gone”,
she was certain he met his father at the flower bed,
I’ve also asked elsewhere and one comes to accept it
as a colourless fact, not something meaningful,
–what more can I say–
he died and we’ve lost touch.
CATS
(The alley protocol.)
Sometimes in the afternoon, when the weather changes from the North
and I happen to find myself at the window because my feet took me passively there,
I look at some cat fighting loudly for something mysterious,
like twenty centimetres of extra earth to cross
or some other matter over which battles have always been fought.
This neighbourhood is suddenly full of stray animals and fights;
they say lots of people came here from the Niger and don’t speak our language,
hidden behind the jobless thug on camels and lorries;
for some of them I feel personally responsible
as if it were me who invited them over to eat out of torn plastic bags.
They say they came crossing the Ursa Major in rowboats
like sailors who climbed aboard the cargo ships with rust,
lifted up like children, from the armpits,
riding the sirocco for six months.
Some get married in Korea,
some play cards on the train
some ask for a cigarette wherever;
I think about all this by the window
with the fraying insulation at its corners, where I put putty
because after ten years of idling in front of the balcony
I missed the old fairy tales they came up with.
The cats have now stopped and look sceptically
upon the truce they’ve decided on,
ready to rush to the strait towards the fence;
the doormen, who are all the same, have betrayed them
by handing out the goods only to their own.
The truth is that we have always spoken this language
during the bulling characterizing our peoples:
the alley is old, even if we all look at each other as strangers.
No matter now, whoever’s in is in;
it’s getting dark with dignity
and soon enough they’ll come
to pick it up.
The person with the gloves is already approaching.
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