Osmosis
by piero scaruffi
San Francisco Bay Area, Arizona, Kiev, Istanbul, Roma, London
25 december 2006
Cantos:
- Eden and Babel: Meditation Upon a smile
- Illumination
- A Melancholy Minuet about the Gap Between You and Me
- Apology of the Demiurge
- Mythology of the Future
- Speculations on a Privileged State of Cognitive Dissonance
- Elegy of the Witness - The Same River Twice
- Critical Annotations on a Daydream
- Al Kitab
- Hypothesis on the Nature of Existence (A Fleeting Moment Of Wonder and Despair)
- Eden and Babel: Meditation Upon a Smile
(Translations of the verses in foreign languages are at the bottom of this page)
"I have seen Eden, garden of Light" (Adam)
The summit was not meant to be seen;
not on this day, not by us. I wanted
this moment to whisper to your smile
what i am without any need for words;
to unfurl on you the curled petals
of the giant sea anemone of my life.
But the fog enveloped us, hinting at
Borges' labyrinth and Berkeley's god,
at a much larger dimension of existence
where you are me and i am less than you;
from which the rings of our twin souls
derive their flowery contours, as if
surrendering to the nudity of time.
I have learned something important
just by watching you watch the world.
An embryo shines the moon,
a myth of lust and doom,
while the stars radiate
what your smile buried
in a grain of sand.
Pratico el arte de existir y perdurar,
ciego,
en los vastos confines de tu sonrisa,
en el mar de cristales, espejos, joyas,
que pintan el mapa infinito de la noche,
el polvo indescifrable de estrellas,
el jardín de cometas, esferas y arcoiris
donde no hay comienzo, pausa o regreso,
mientras las lunas que se han evaporado,
y que tu miraste sin alas o palabras,
libre del mito, libre de las mentiras,
y, sin embargo, frágil dédalo de deseos,
no son mas que ecos, sombras, sueños,
que me persiguen e impulsan,
perpetuo descanso de perpetua agonía,
hacia el común destino y martirio,
la divina impostura de este planeta,
el dolor sin fin de ser sin haber sido.
My remark about your hair
was not about your hair at all.
It was a way to answer
your unspoken question,
to hold together all
those unlived moments.
On a quitté la mer
sans lui dire que nous reviendrons.
The world looks different through
the lens of your smile. It has,
in fact, disappeared. I was blinded
by a waterfall of tiny crystals
leapfrogging entire universes
like a runaway Bach canon.
La lueur des nuages au crépuscule tisse
des contes dont nous lirons jamais la fin.
I was deafened by polyphonic music
of supernatural depth and harmony,
each individual voice playing
a wildly different future.
Frissons du ciel allument tes yeux;
coquillages phosphorescents dont
j'attends le murmure de l'audelà.
I stood spellbound under the rainbow
that your lips had drawn in the sky
and that slowly traversed your eyes
populating them of lush gardens,
each eye a sun, peeking
behind dusty galaxies
at unknowable memories.
La vie est une autre plage
sur laquelle j'aimerai retourner
avec toi.
Whenever i stared back down
into the darkening canyon,
i smelled the fragrance
of your gaze, knowing
that you were watching
from a lower turn of the trail
the same infinite disappear
into the same nameless nothingness
but knowing as well (and fearing)
that what i saw as silent emptiness
was to you full of unfinished
miracles.
Im Nebel meines Lebens
kann ich kaum erkennen
die Welt, die ich betrachte.
Alles, was ich sehe,
sind Schatten von Dir.
I think of you as a storm
that alters a landscape
that i had painstakingly
mapped in time.
(When you feel the pain,
you perhaps embody
so much of what matters
about humanity).
I (the deserter, the silent
witness, the virgin martyr,
the zealous time-keeper,
a clown of hopeless routes,
an oracle of ancient history,
the knight of wonderland,
or just the last cobblestone
in your long journey home)
can hear you cry.
You playing with the waves
at the beach (on another foggy day)
and the euphoria of the seagulls
emerging from the twitching quicksand
of sunrise, felt like two sides
of the same truth, both impossible
to render in words or images,
two views of a daydream's utopia.
I took a futile photograph
of the aquarium in your eyes
as you were running towards me
clothed in a shawl of saltwater,
and realized how the first man
must have felt, contemplating beauty
beyond his power to comprehend.
The thought of you is a lonely swallow
swimming back from the other bank
of the horizon, stretching wings
that are dreams of eternal bliss.
Where does the Earth end if not
in the mandalas of your eyes?
Quando di quel sorriso sbocciato
in incognito come il loto alato
nella laguna coperta da un sudario
di aironi i petali ebbri di aurora
si accasciarono nelle mie pupille
prosciugando di suoni la natura,
inventai per te un mondo infinito
di vaste paludi di cieli stellati,
di bufere di fantasmi di corallo,
di nevi azzurre sul bordo del sole,
di diluvi mitici di lava di lucciole
nel ventre di perla di una foglia,
per ripetere ancora senza fiato
il tuo nome come un sacro mantra
inciso da un diamante di fulmine
nel cuore gia` spento dell'estate.
Dimenticai per poter ricordare
cio` che eri e sempre sarai,
pur non sapendo che sapere
e` un modo di dimenticare.
Nei tuoi occhi ho finalmente visto
il mio riflesso. Non ho che questo
da offrirti. Non ho che me stesso,
saltimbanco in un dedalo di tenebre.
"We are such stuff
as dreams are made on"
(Shakespeare)
The universe devoted
its entire existence to it.
Her smile is the reward
for having spun all those
senseless billion years.
Everything floats, addicted
to her heavenly orbits.
How i wish i could be the moon
that unveils the queen of all stars.
"E quindi uscimmo
a riveder le stelle" (Dante)
I shall never betray your invisibility,
but i would like to surprise you
with the longest poem of my life
carved on the tiniest dewdrop
of the least of your moments.
"Let there be light" (God)
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- Elegy of the Witness - The Same River Twice
The shining spires of Istanbul
disappear under the lunar pollen
that the dervishes evoked
with their feverish dances.
The day is dismantled
only to be reassembled
less different tomorrow.
Bats dye jagged orbits
into the mesh of a bleeding
sky, like kites torn apart
by wicked whirlwinds.
I waded through the stillness
past a concert of flickering candles
lulling the thin layer of shadows
at the edge of the bridge, and faded
into the cold wind of the strait
where the lights morphed into the city,
one man waltzing with his ghost
the dance they never danced back home.
Do these stars return nightly
to show us something
that we've always failed to see?
Are these stars the same
reflections that twinkled
in your eyes at the beach?
Is this world the same creature
that looked so small next to you?
Night turns the heart into a stage
where our drama can be reenacted
without fear of reciting the lines
that we spent a lifetime rehearsing.
Why am i here tonight
if not to feel the distance
and long for what i left behind?
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- Illumination
How sweet letting you happen to me,
free-falling like a meteor
into a pre-existing crater.
How fulfilling to become
merely an extension of you,
for you to bury and resurrect
at will.
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Commentary #1
Women display a propensity
to continuously redraw
mirror images of themselves
(like petals or snowflakes
or, more to the point, like
antibodies) that keep multiplying
in a fractal pattern, a mandala
that in turn generates
an inner landscape of denial.
They inhale like opium
the invincible logic of deceit.
They play a game
that they take
for reality.
They are consumed by a dogmatic sense
of personal history unfolding out of
biological history, when, in fact,
their life flows the other way around.
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- A Melancholy Minuet about the Gap Between You and Me
"And since you know you cannot see yourself,
so well as by reflection, I, your glass,
will modestly discover to yourself
that of yourself which you yet know not of."
(Shakespeare)
There are many inside you.
A life is a symphony of selves
that often pull in different directions.
A melody emerged from the cacophony
flying into uncharted land:
my brain tries in vain to whistle it
so that you could recognize me.
You are lost in the dense maze
that you erected around your smile.
You yearn to be found, but you can't be.
"You are the music while the music
lasts" (Eliot).
You yearn to be the echo
after the music stopped.
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I lay upon the grass
listening to your voice
(that i had memorized
a week earlier in the woods)
until the words ended
and the world fell silent.
I did not stop listening.
But you, my world, had stopped
speaking.
I knew the time had come.
I got up and started running
again, blindfolded,
with no destination.
Who was i
when i was not myself?
A pilgrim? a ghost?
An uninvited guest?
I stand in an empty world
staring at a river
that wasn't there.
I don't know this place
but i know where i am:
i am where you are.
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Something is dead in my mind
like a fossil or a lie.
Something is lost forever
every time you smile
and i'm left out of it.
Afraid, i call your name.
You whisper your smile,
louder than the big bang.
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And your symphony rages on,
a gentle chaos of feathery notes
fluttering along their stave,
eventually converging into this point
of the spacetime lattice that is me.
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- Apology of the Demiurge
Fueled by a rich tapestry
of symbols, by a Moebius strip
of crossword puzzles, the droning "om"
in your eyes roams the charred
dreamscape that lies between
the possibility of transcendence
and the necessity of reality.
You blackmail yourself.
("Your future is
all the signs
that disappear
before you can
read them").
Nothing has meaning
except for you
to give meaning to it.
We are all fictions
of your imagination.
Only you exist.
We merely persist.
And butterflies. So many
to turn the whole sky
into a mirror image of
you.
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Commentary #2
It takes two to write a poem.
You have to "be" a poem.
Then i simply write the words
as they emanate from you.
The flower and the poem
cannot be separated.
Words drip from petals.
and petals grow from words.
Beauty is not in the eye
of the beholder: he is
in the fragile stem of beauty.
This poem is you.
And it is
a never ending poem,
that one shall write
day after day.
The thousand threads
of your life
will come together
only at the end.
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As the world we know gets
less and less meaningful,
and life drifts to a standstill
between the rain and the rainbow,
i reach for the feeble heartbeat
of dew dropping from weary leaves,
to hear the music that i never heard
from you. This is the sound that
could have made me love my life.
I rescued you
from oblivion
only to find out
that you were
a character
in someone
else's
play.
(Sometimes i smell the pages
instead of reading the ink
and wonder if words
are the only way
to tell a story).
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- Mythology of the Future
Every time you leave a place
you enter another one. Every
departure is an arrival.
"We know what we are, but
know not what we may be" (Shakespeare)
"What is truth" asked Pilate of Jesus
and turned the first page
of the eternal verdict.
The fisherman replied with the pearl,
and the shepherd with a burning twig.
Haystacks smoke outside
the windows of the train, painting
my thoughts on the brown canvas of autumn,
and remind me of the infinite space
that i glimpsed when you sat
tired in the park, an angel
in the forest of my soul.
"Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
che la diritta via era smarrita" (Dante)
"What is truth"?
We may have forgotten
how to listen.
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- Speculations on a Privileged State of Cognitive Dissonance
We all wait for (and expect)
the myth that will save us,
whether from loneliness,
chaos, meaninglessness
or exhaustion.
Our self is not equipped
with the tool to save itself.
Salvation lies beyond
the borders of our inner life,
it requires another being,
another inner life,
a mirror image
or a doppelganger,
a "you" to fill the "i".
In a sense, there is no
being to save, as the self
becomes a being only after
"being" saved by its savior.
We drift, like outcasts,
until we can cling to a cliff
or the tide dumps us on a beach
or a mermaid swims us to shore.
Then we exist.
Then we are one.
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Commentary #3
We have nothing in common:
your life is as much about forgetting
as mine is about remembering.
We use the same words to speak
different languages. Every city
every mountain and every voice
is still in my heart.
But you, instead, conceive memory
as a curse, the past as a pointless
distraction from the present;
each reminder as the judge
of an awful crime that you
did not commit but will have
to atone for.
Deprived of your innocence,
you are doomed to cancel
yourself out as your grow up.
You tell a story as if
it were the only one.
I can't conceive a story
without all the others.
Each story tells another story.
Each life lives another life.
I want to remember forever
every gesture that made
this poem take shape.
After you read it, you'll want
to forget every word of it.
You live to avoid destiny;
I live to face it defiantly.
I wish you were right
and there were only one story
and all others were elliptic
chapters, bundled together
to unravel the cryptic plot.
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A lump of moonlight
ruffles the glowing ashes
(the open wounds)
in her sleepy eyes.
Ultimately she smiles because
there is nothing to smile about.
I have known her since
the beginning of time, when
the first sparks erupted
from the altar, and the priests
morphed into stars to set
the clockwork in motion
that would bring us here today.
She came from the desert,
a grain of sand shouting
the gap between the finite
and the infinite that Newton
foresaw and Joyce exorcised.
She will cross the threshold
of the dream and decipher it
without uttering a syllable
acknowledging my madness
with a sigh of relief.
Her goodnight kiss will sound
more like a prophecy
that i have to fulfil.
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As we ventured alone
into the narrow gorge,
i wanted to tell you
"Whatever was alive
has long been dead".
But you had been
the first one to die.
You always will be
something that i lost
before i could find it.
I met a woman who did not exist.
Die Grosse Stille.
La Tourneuse de Pages.
- Critical Annotations on a Daydream
Existence
does not exist.
You dream
yourself
dreaming.
You are
the missing link
between space
and time.
Let us draw maps of places
where we have never been.
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- Al Kitab
A smile is a crystal
of thought.
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- Hypothesis on the Nature of Existence (A Fleeting Moment Of Wonder and Despair)
I feared your power to turn me
into someone else, even into a lost
nomad, in spite of never having failed
to reach my destinations;
and into a fragment of a bigger
self, instead of the whole
that i've always been.
You speak words
that rise like mountains
in all directions
for me to climb.
There is much we can do
to live beyond this life.
There is enough in us
to live multiple lives
and regret having lived
at all.
I have to step out of myself
just to say "hi" to you.
The spell is a mind mirror.
The guilt of being
without having been.
We all bear the brunt
of your original sin,
of the deep silent fire
that ignited your future.
A cosmic battle
consumes itself
inside your every
smile.
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- Appendix: translations
(German)
In the fog of my life
i can hardly see
the world i look at.
All i see is shadows of you.
(Italian)
When of that smile blossomed
incognito like the winged lotus
in the lagoon covered with a shroud
of herons the drunk petals of dawn
fainted in my pupils
draining nature of all sound,
i invented for you an infinite world
of vast swamps of starry skies,
of storms of coral ghosts,
of azure snows on the edge of the sun,
of mythical floods of lava of fireflies
in the belly of the pearl of a leaf,
in order to still repeat breathless
your name like a sacred mantra
carved by a diamond of lighting
in the already cold heart of summer.
I forgot to be able to remember
what you were and will always be,
although i did not know that to know
is a way to forget.
In your eyes i have finally seen
my reflection. I have nothing else
but this to offer you. I have but myself,
a jester in a maze of darkness.
(Dante)
And thus we reemerged
and saw again the stars.
(French)
We left the sea without telling him.
that we shall return.
The glow of clouds at sunset weave tales
of which we will never read the end.
Shivers of sky light up your eyes;
phosphorescent shells from which i wait
for the hum of the otherworld.
Life is another beach
to which i would like to return
with you.
(Hindi)
Sunset only means that everything
will soon be reborn less different.
(Sunrise means to everybody
what sunset only means to me).
(Chinese)
Everybody is a sign for something.
I know less and less
(Arabic)
You speak to the world
like a mother to a newborn.
You listen to the world
like a newborn to her mother.
(Spanish)
I practice the art of existing and persisting,
blind,
in the vast borders of your smile,
in a sea of crystals, mirrors and gems,
that paint the infinite map of the night,
the indecipherable dust of stars,
the garden of comets, spheres and rainbows
where there is no beginning, pause or return,
while the moons that have flown away,
and that you glanced at without wings or words,
free of myth, free of lies,
and, notwithstanding, fragile maze of desires,
are nothing but echoes, shadows, dreams,
that haunt me and propel me,
eternal rest of eternal agony,
towards the common fate and martyrdom,
the divine swindle of this planet,
the endless pain of being without having been.
Thanks to the people who helped to revise the lines in foreign languages:
- Hindi: Mahdu, Palak
- French: Iantha, Anne
- German: Matthias, Olaf
- Spanish: Sofia
- Chinese: Tao
- Arabic: Hassan
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