Piero Scaruffi's poem "Synthesis"

A Poem for All Poems - Odes (2004-07)
piero scaruffi

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"I've been looking for
you: where are you?
Are you in your articles?
Are you in your poetry?
Are you with your friends?
I can't find you anywhere.
You go to everywhere,
but it seems that you
have lost yourself."
(Letter from my friend Tao Zhu,
Beijing, february 2006)

(Ode to the Self)

It only makes sense to write
of which one knows nothing.

"You are something
that everybody else
is doing. Elsewhere."

I understand very well
what i cannot understand at all.

"A paradise shimmers
on the other side
of your mind. Your
mind is not yours.
The more the less".

The question is not
"why" but "how":
how can we be?

To understand is to forgive,
or, at least, silently recast
the fiction so that it will
tell a story with the same
plot but a different ending.

(And what if god is one of us?
What if i am god, and a divine
amnesia has erased the world
as it was supposed to be?)
(Ode to Death)
I am afraid of how
afraid I will be.

I am myself
only when
I think
of death;
the fictions
recede,
and become
philosophy;
and philosophy
science,
and science
history,
history
of the self.

"This is, after all,
my last will,
and one, for once,
of no beginning,
of no memories,
and of no ending.
Nothing. Nobody.
Nowhere.

May the last minute
be like the first one,
an act of reversing
the non-existence
of centuries gone,
redeeming a past
both vividly remembered
and never experienced
and never experienced
and never experienced

Always and never
are the two sides
of each instant.

For the time being
the ultimate question
remains unthought,
a redundant appendix.
(Ode to Nature)
Nature's disdain
for truth
is self-evident.
The scent
of the pollen
disguises
the bee's true
intentions.

The calm
and articulate
candor of sunset
blindfolds the eye
that is supposed
to roam the skies
for signs of life.
Life is on Earth,
we are told
by an inner voice
or we tell ourselves
that so we are told.
The mask of beauty
grins at the innocent.

To live and be
like a flower.
To live and become
the message itself,
not a silent, living
thing at all, the full
inexplicable power
of the largest ocean
of all, the one
inside us.

Death towers
over all.
(Ode to Thought)
Our minds
have bodies
that think.

The fiction
of our science
is the psychology
of our religion.
As we focus,
the focus shifts.
Thought is
indeterminate
to the extent
that we think
what can be
thought.

Our bodies
have minds
that walk.
(Ode to Life/ I)
How can life be so fragile?
How can my life mean
so little to so many?
(Ode to the Dead)
The dead
can't walk.
The city
of the dead
predated
the city
of the living.

Death makes life
how we know it.

We, the dead,
are the sole architects
of our existence.
The building, of course,
exists only while it is
being built.

We master the art
of what can be said
without saying it
and we leave this life
without quite knowing
how to fully explain
what happened to us.

(Nothing that can be
perceived, Oscar,
is worth learning).

In a sense,
there is no sense.
In the same sense,
sense is all there is.
(Ode to the Universe)
In the face of
the endless free fall
shaping our universe,
what is one expected
to expect?
(Ode to the Future)
All we hear
when we sing
is the echoes
of a silence
shouting back
the beginning
that we forgot.

(When a shining maze
of timeless filaments
morphed into the soul
of everything
and everywhere,
the future,
not the past,
was created).

We could remember
ourselves before
we existed, but,
mostly, we don't
want to. It hurts.
And it has no ending.
The ending is beyond
memory. Memory
of the future
is more painful
than of the past.

There are no footsteps
of our secret journeys
to the source of life.

The aimless carillon
keeps playing its tune
across space and time.
The beaches, glimpsed
from far away,
do not reveal
any harbor, or,
for that matter,
any route.
(Ode to the Sky)

Are there other planets
on which the sky is blue?

As a child, i often
wondered if everybody
died but me, if i was
the only immortal.
As an adult, i wonder
what it would be like
to be the only one
who dies, the only
mortal
among
immortals.
(Ode to the Mother)

Something about the mortality
of your own mother strikes you
as a cosmic revolution.
The decomposition
of that familiar body
that will never reappear
has changed the universe
and the temporal dimension
forever.
Now it is your turn, and you
know it, and she is not even
waiting for you: she simply
does not exist anymore.
She is leaking her soul,
into the earth, slime
to be collected
by the rains
of future worlds.

Before the funeral
i had read something
about the sky
not being blue except
on this planet.
While we were walking
down the deserted streets
of her native village
i stared at the sky,
not at the coffin.

I have held infinity in the palm
of my hand, William: stones,
pebbles, shells, berries, twigs,
lichens, crystals, bubbles,
leaves, petals, and, closer and
closer, pecks of dust, pollen,
flecks of dirt, a simple dot
of nothing.

From being
all there is
to not being.
(Ode to the Wind)
If life is this, if life
is nothing but a pearl
in a casket, if the scent
that we revere as "death"
has trailed us from birth,
permeating the very air
that we breathe, if lust
and greed ultimately are
evil survival strategies,
if joy and sorrow are mere
reflections of algorithms
that we unwillingly perform
until we wholly run out
of digits to compute
and words to understand;
if life is no more than this,
crouching alone in a corner
and whispering my lost name
to the shadowy maze, hoping
for someone to tear the web
and rescue the fly; if life
has no ending, and death is
only a tiny moment in time,
who will sweep the dead
leaves from the ground
when I close the door
behind me and follow
the rainbow towards
the stately resignation
of the shore?
What will keep track
of one's arrivals and departures
that, like the gentle ripples
carved on the water of the lake
by the sobbing swan tied
to an invisible center of gravity
and propelled by the universal urge
to make the unfamiliar familiar,
radiate the ancestral meaning
to the rest of the world?
(Ode to the Mountain)

As we climb the slope already ravished
by dawn, the pulsing darkness exhaling
from the primeval womb of the planet
grants us a new birth at every step.
Only after having been can we begin
to undo our path and our thoughts.
We know where we want to go only after
we have been there. We are because we
were. We were because we shall be.
The cycle is unbroken as we climb higher,
away from the center, away from the source.
Blinded by the sun that storms the summit,
we know we will never find our way back.
We know that our minds are trapped forever
in the destination, now that the destination
is behind us and our long journey has ended.
The destination remembered us. We will not
remember it. We shall be back. We'll live.
Dusk reminds us of the steep climb down,
of the womb from which millions have come
and millions more shall come after us,
to become part of us the way we became
part of it, to be united with the source.
We travel back because that is what we are.
We are not travelers, we are surrenderers.
The spider web has all the answers. The sky
has none. The wind at the top is the echo
of all the voices that have been here before.
They are still here with us, dead and alive,
fossils of untold histories, of unlived lives,
snow flakes glued to the granite veins
of the mountain, dandruff on the moon.
Silence has all the answers. Forever. Them.
(Ode to You)
"The symphony of crystals
that explodes in your eyes
when nobody is looking
will it outlast
its echo, or sink
heavier than the I
into oblivion's
ever recurring
nightmare?"

(We speak as if
we were one soul
in one universe
instead
of multitudes
of yesterdays
in waterfalls
of emptiness).
(Ode to Eternity)
Knowing is not being.

You can measure eternity, if you
have to, along the rainbow
sculpted on the surface
of the luminescent thread
hung by a spider like a note
between two fluttering leaves.

At sunset a trail
of ants scoured
the unfolding
carcass of a slug.
A death in the forest
of a nameless animal
reminded me of the shell
that we studied in school,
of the eternal breathing
of dead beings of ages ago.
No sea could have filled
the florid spirals
with so many bits
of the cosmic speech.
Wandering inside
the endless vortex
of the chalky path,
like a smiling face
trapped in a vast
maze of mirrors,
the drone was powerless
to cease and vanish.

Eternity lasted
a few seconds.
The present
is lasting
forever.
(Ode to the Fossils)
Who
is listening
to my complaint,
who will deliver
the last sentence,
and who
will remain
to dispose
of the undead
that no ocean
will ever
claim as bait?

What is death?
What is it
that is happening
to me, to us,
to them? We "are"
death. We are
born fossils,
but we die
brains.
(Ode to the Soul)
When the sky
leaked kites on the beach, I had
a vision of dripping filaments
of mud casting silence between
the ink of these words.
I felt the ocean was an incandescent
translucent brain removed
from its skull. When the city gates
were carved by countless shades
of darkness, the tales of the survivors
emptied the night, the drunk
architecture of their faces draining
the alluvial floods of their fates.
So it is that rust forms in the timewarp,
and the universe appears to be
a vast mirror of my withering
soul.
(Ode to Myself)
(The universe
is easier
to understand
sometimes if
you think of it
not as a you
but as an i).
(Ode to Birth)
I hear the sound of all,
and louder every hour,

the melody inside the egg,

the tide that lulls us
ante litteram,

before anything is revealed,

the glacial erosion
that accounts for the
unexpected crevice
on the way
to salvation,

a clangor of obelisks, crosses
and prayer wheels, always farther
away than you plot them to be,

the cracking of the shell,

the divine hourglass
bleeding stars on worlds,

the buzz of the giant brain,
each moon a neuron
that pumps blood into the others,
each galaxy a super-thought
that thinks itself and all.
(Ode to Light)
Nothingness envelops
even the thought of it.

"We emerged tuned to the harmony
of creation, languages without
a voice, voices without a sound."

(To explain
the unexplainable
we often tell it
in the foreign idiom
of the explainable).

We gasped in an abyss of meaning.
Then we were redeemed by prophets
who had survived the cataclysm.

And now, out of the labyrinth
that science has erected for us
we have, unwillingly, become
prophets ourselves, forever bound
to create ignorance and apocalypse
under the pretense of knowledge.

Everything radiates
from darkness,
because only darkness
can be seen:
light blinds.
(Ode to Knowledge/ Part I)
"You are not afraid"
"Yes, of course I am"

No, you cannot be:
you are fearless
in a way that you
have not learned
to know.

(Cohere you could not make it, Ezra,
but i cannot make it end either).

The truth is not in you
or in me, the truth is
in between, and beyond
(the stream of consciousness
of the objects that surround us
being no less real than ours).

Lightning feeds the sky.
In a way, the ending has
been removed from the story.
Unlike what Plato foretold,
remembering my name in the
darkest cave was easy enough.

Time emerges from frail
fluctuations of reality.
The future is a reconnaissance
of invisible territories.

And suddenly you know
and the knowledge of knowing
repudiates your previous self,
and you are but a dialogue
between what you know
and what you do not know.

Like a blind man
i have seen light
where was only
utter darkness.
(Ode to Desperation)
We often confuse
everything that exists
and the existence of everything.
It is easier to erase from the universe
an immortal thing than a mortal one:
the mortal one keeps happening
no matter how many times it dies.

It is futile to infer eternity
from the flow of time.
The continuity of all lives
is the discontinuity of immortalities.

Emptiness is full of empty entities
that interact with each other
and vanish into the vanishing
of the others.

The world at large
has evolved into a state
of being in which its origins
are no longer what they were.

Most of the time
nothing really happens.
Yet, everything happens
all the time.
There are no answers. Only
questions.
(Ode to Knowledge/ Part II)
Consciousness is all reality.
There is nothing beyond consciousness,
although there might be something
out there, after all.
Reality dwells at the edge of infinity.
It constitutes a border, a line drawn
in the sand, a twisting contour of days,
the crest of the wave as it crashes
upon the reef, the horizon as it sinks
at sunset in the eyes of the castaway.
The fabric of reality has been torn
by a godless supernatural order.
We emerged from that crack. I am
the experience of myself, as i survived
the cataclysm and saw the others drown.
I swam to shore, therefore i am.
Whatever can be know, i am it.
(Ode to Life/ II)
Life is an arcane metaphor
that we follow to its dead
end. Slowly we become
metaphors of ourselves.
(Ode to the Shadow)
"You don't know what to say."

("Lastly we shall see
more kinds of shadows,
never the sun as it is").
Life is a question
in the form of an answer.

"Yes, I know what to say:
I don't know how to say it."

I am god.

(Ode to Silence)
(As well as the creature
that I forgot I created).

"We should speak once,
and then never again".

Forgive me
for not forgiving you.