Life is not a journey,
it is a destination.
The truth
that is most remote from our own.
We draw our maps
for fear of getting lost:
still we get lost all the time,
and still we can't stop drawing
in finer and finer detail.
We were begotten in a dream.
And we shall return to the same dream,
in due time, immune from sin,
to play the ending that we learned
at the beginning, till time undoes us,
doomed by the very route we followed.
We pause, after the long ride,
visitors to a habitat of primeval darkness,
to a maze of existential hairpins.
We change the (visible) subject again,
our silence rhyming with our innocence,
sitting on the steps of the observatory
like pilgrims praying in the original shrine.
En route.
Nothing is exactly the way we do it.
A gale that stifles, hissing from the past.
City lights from the top of the mountain
like millions of eyes staring at us...
gilded coins cast from the skies...
gaunt stars nonchalantly spilled
on the monotonous landscape of homes...
shimmering ashes of the bonfire
that devoured shape and depth...
fireflies nipping the night wind,
glittering down the ravine we lusted for.
We don't believe in God,
but God believes in us,
and his stern warning commands
our attention even in the dense
blankness of our fairy tale:
there are too many stories to tell.
I dive blind and breathless
into the sand of twilight,
struggling to recollect
the last words I uttered
before I met you, before
I fell through a mirror
into someone else's life.
"So shall I live
supposing thou art true"
(Shakespeare, Sonnet 93);
but then also, as in
John Donne's dreame:
"Thou art not thou".
The delicate grace of an orchid.
The gaze of a cat in the moonlight.
A slender body of snowflakes.
A Mozart's adagio perennially
ringing in your voice.
Nothing, not even the tide,
has such small hands.
Somewhere I have never traveled to
you have seen me.
Oh, to caress your soft mermaid
hair while a flock of seagulls
writes your name in the sun!
To cuddle all the passing dreams
that climb the petals of your smile!
Dressed in the last gleams of the day,
the infinite horizons of your eyes
all flash with thin laughter,
walking me around the campus
like Beatrice guided Dante
through paradise ("l'amor
che move il sole e l'altre stelle"),
you remind me that the sense
of the topics we discuss
changes every single moment,
but it can never exceed ours.
I feel now like I am delivering
someone else's speech,
tormented by a sense of loss
for something I have never had
and it is now so close to me,
the city below consumed by a cold fire,
the butterfly dances of the moon
reminding me of what I came here
to tell you, to share with you,
that may never go beyond ambiguity;
the pleasures of intellectual abstinence
(Socrates' rational debauchery) colliding
with the dismay of making merely
a cameo appearance in your life,
every indecisive digression a further
step away from the center of mass,
from the quicksand of plot reversals
(your innocence and mine are different,
two shadows of the same body);
my quest for absolute purity
leading to the austere haughtiness
of Villiers' Count Axel ("vivre?
les serviteurs feront cela pour nous").
Has it ever occurred to you
that time blows through us
from (sudden) birth to death
feeding darkness with light;
that we burn till we die,
like all stars?
(Only despair, secure in its bleak
reasons, neglects the plain statistics
that most of us have already died).
Anche nella fine
il principio continua.
Then an invisible flower
(un fiore identico a te)
whispers the unspeakable:
and we belatedly understand
that the two halves of the sky
revolve around us; that we are
time. (Or, with Heraclitus,
that "time is a child").
As we learn,
we know less and less.
We lose meaning
as we try to understand.
We try to explain
until we realize
that nobody knows
if we really happened.
(Do we think
or are we thought?)
We mean what we know.
And all I know today is that
you exist, like nothing else
does, like only a poem can
(am I writing this poem,
or merely copying it, like
an amanuensis whose life's meaning
is but the series of frail
signs he carefully duplicates
over and over again?)
Sun rust whirling
in a lattice of dew.
A fossil drifting to its past,
unfocused lens of time.
Sculptures of foam
stand still over the cliffs,
like obscene graffiti littered
over the plaster of this vast
expanding shell of moonlight.
Is this another night, or am I
living just one long night
that perpetually reenacts itself
along different orbits?
(The answer is, of course,
Shakespeare's "All days are nights
to see till I see thee,
and nights bright days
when dreams do show thee me").
We are talking not for us, but for them:
we are playing our music to the stars.
The stars have been playing theirs to us
for millions of nights: we are that music.
They brought us here, note by note.
Every bit of the universe,
every monolith of light,
every blink of galactic pollen,
dissolving and then recomposing
countless times before we appeared
and began our arduous journeys
towards this secret meeting point.
And now we play ourselves back to them.
Now they are us, their blood,
their breath, their heartbeat.
I am a midnight, you are heaven.
Tonight you are all there is to be.
(As mighty as the infinite atom is,
how could they pack so much beauty
in such a small being?)
All the time this echo of waves
has trailed back to us,
has been expecting us to listen,
like two deaf eternities.
The echo of all sounds
in the dark tunnel of history.
Life feeds on life.
Over so many centuries
mankind has learned only
how to make deserts
even more barren still.
Like Caliban, "you taught me
to talk and my profit on it is
that now I know how to curse".
We humans were told
to inhabit the ruins
and we took shelter
under the firmament.
We touched this planet
like a Braille book
and soon discovered
the writing in the rifts:
there is no future
in the spider's web;
but that is where ants
plant their kiss,
in the glue, in the grip,
of eternity.
Ever since we started speaking
this idiom we don't understand,
even since we started eavesdropping
what the sea mutters to the sky,
we knew that our role was to be
merely a mistake that will never
turn into a resolution.
(In Averroes' scathing omen,
"the destruction of destruction").
All religions are erosions of truth,
hesitations of our evolving form,
bargains with the devil.
We recoil from our own powers,
unable to endure the clash
of forever and never.
Farewell to the prophet,
who never preached.
Farewell to the envoy,
who never came
and never went
but will return.
Don't you too yearn to climb
every hill that you coast,
allured by a compass
of sighs which measures
the distance to the sky?
Don't you too exile yourself,
endlessly redrawing your maps,
towards more and more
remote islands
and truths?
Isn't this a way of daydreaming?
of escaping from the irrelevant,
of migrating beyond the counterfeit,
that are ubiquitous and irresistible,
inherent in every latent double
of the world? yet of discovering
that nothing is everything?
From a deeper, unfinished dimension,
from Dali's "Persistence of Memory",
visions of an impassable trail
in pulsing sheets of mist.
I envy the lighthouse keeper,
who observes and is not observed.
A deep self hidden from the soul,
a shadow dressed in my same clothes,
clasping dead what I loathe alive
in the debris of the ravaged evening,
bars my thoughts from entering
the crumbling Babel Tower of immortality,
from probing Rimbaud's last
night in hell ("c'est le feu
qui se releve avec son damne'"),
from meeting childhood along
the downward path to wisdom.
We are both messengers,
carrying the same message,
the curse and the miracle,
to the crowd looking for boats
to cross a river that has drained.
I beg him like monk Hopkins,
"how shall I make room for myself"
in the wreck of the ship?
And still be immaculate
before your voice begins
to redeem unbounded deserts.
The impossible and the absolute
are one and the same,
nuances of crystal waterfalls
on the far side of your shadow.
(If I never dream will I ever die?)
One wonders if Baudelaire's
joy of death ("et dites-moi
s'il est encor quelque torture
pur ce vieux corps sans ame
et mort parmi les morts")
was a case of ventriloquism
or of a witness lying under oath.
Your eyes are too near,
and so far away.
Can you balance yourself
on the thin wire of my folly?
Will you still follow me,
angelic Alice, with silk wings
of trust, up the stem?
Goya's jagged silhouettes
to Bruegel's huddled outcasts.
The specter of Faust's guilt
rising from a cloud of skylarks.
If you ever affix the signature
of your frown to the frigid
spires of Angkor Wat, or
to the limp pyramids of Tikal,
then you will perceive
your existence too as
indivisible but imbued
with signs of otherness,
like being a love-letter
from a parallel world,
carried by beaks of dragons
through quantum diaphragms,
Our planet, multiplying
into thousands of tiny planets,
will appear from design
but a disorder of the mind.
Up the stem:
in the bloom we trust.
Words, however futile
and insignificant, need
to be anchored in our fate
by participating in sacred
rites of communion.
I, for one, long for rescue,
turn towards my life's shore,
to you, to the question to which
there is no reply, with quivering
voice of foolish hope and numb
desire, with Eliot's Ash-Wednesday
whine ("and let my cry come
into thee"), like Lucretium lost
in your mirror image ("nam tu sola
potes tranquilla pace invare mortalis").
And you, ocean, shall remain,
to divide us and unite us,
one bird flying back and forth,
weaving dawns into sunsets.
A sense of sunrise meowing
behind the thick curtain;
of you, sleepy and barefoot,
bowing to fondle it.
You are everywhere
my mind has been.
Did you notice that every step
can be taken at any point
in any direction without changing
the course of our trip?
As we advance, following
the grand footprints of fear,
the world changes all the time
in every point, thereby hatching
stories of stories of stories,
that no man is capable
of telling anymore
(the last word being
the same in all languages).
Thoughts
die in rings...
philosophical doodling...
in prophetic codes that
the scribes cannot decipher,
but we can use to understand.
Rainbows on the only page
of the only book of the only
library of the world.
The winged horses of oblivion
carry us inside an endless memory.
Intimations of Saint Augustine
preaching the holiness of time
(his corpse was buried under stones
that have been growing ever since).
Maybe only clocks are alive.
Silence cutting
the splendid marble of your thoughts,
stillness splitting
the burning towers of your emotions.
The mind is a rehearsal for a substance
purer and deeper.
This poem is about the words
that do not yet exist
for what you are.
The tide at last recedes
revealing a trail of seeds
in the gravel of our lives,
in the shell of our laughter,
in the breeze of stars
that ruffled our souls.
Let us wait
where there is no beyond.
Let us wake up
at the other end of time.
Let us collect all the words
that were never uttered by any one,
we twin endless rivers
flowing to the ultimate ocean,
and hide the chasm in our currents.
Let us pass through the unnamed
wreckage of this earth, blinded
by the explosion, and return
where we met, two beings, one voice.
We have no sins
but the one
of not having sinned.
If we do not inherit
a paradise,
we shall inherit ourselves.
Alice "looked up, but it was
all dark overhead; before her
was another long passage,
and the white rabbit was still
in sight, hurrying down it".
Maybe this is what
we were meant to be:
to walk together where
no one else ever walked.
There is no "there",
only "here".
Meaning is not what we have,
but what we search for,
blindfold, in our souls.
"And yes I said yes I will yes"
(James Joyce, "Ulysses").