Dialogue of the Lovers
(excerpts translated with Barbara Moroncini's help)
Poems by piero scaruffi
TM, ®, Copyright © 1998-2015 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
Poem in three parts:
- Alef: 35 Cantos
- Apeiron: 35 Cantos
- Nil: 35 Cantos
This page contains a selection of the cantos.
Click here for the whole 105 cantos.
Characters:
- 'm' : man
- 'f' : woman
- ' ': ?
Note on reading:
The poem is not to be read by starting from the first canto, but from a canto
of your choice.
(Evidence): "La
eternidad es solo lo que sigue, lo igual; y comunica por armonia y
luz con lo terreno" Juan Ramon Jimenez
"de mes enfers
pensifs les confins sans espoir" Paul Valery
"So leben wir und
nehmen immer Abschied" Rainer Maria Rilke
"They hand in hand
with wandring steps and slow through Eden took thir solitarie
way" John Milton
"were all like
workings of one mind the features of the same
face ... characters of the great Apocalypse" William Wordsworth
"Do you not also
observe that mountains distant from the observer appear to be
black, while being in themselves other than the color seen? The cause
is only the distance..." Ibn al-'Arabi
First Part: Alef
Monologue
f: Since centuries I
forge ahead
in this wind,
lifted by a distant
past,
that conforms to the
glistening creases
of my sullen,
weathered cape.
In the snail of
glowworms
of the imminent dusk
the cities I visited
crowd up buzzing
around my footsteps
like flies on the
carcass
of a disemboweled
cub.
A wonderer lost in
time
will lead me to the
imaginary place
towards which I am walking.
And memory, recoiling
into a crystal dolmen,
prostrate within the
firs’
emaciated fronds
turned like pages
by an old woman’s
timorous hands,
has no other
destination
than that void of
meaning.
Being here is
terrible.
Intermezzo
It is impossible to go
any further.
The tracks funnel organic matter
from one sundial to the other
relentlessly.
All around the crater
in the gravel of the cosmic debris,
in the blinding mist
of their alien reflections,
a gallop between sun and stone
jolts, behemoth,
the foundations of time.
Monologue
f: At the center of the
sundial
I hold in my fingers
your hourglass lips
and inflate the
balloon
flaccid of your face
until it soars in the
air
and without thrusting
a cry
flutters inert in the
wind.
It bounces on the
solar sand,
it shatters, banner
of mortals
in the tragic duel,
thrusting a shout
that sends rolling
breathless circles of
water
over my eye’s
fragmented shell.
Your gaze
cries golden islands
along the uncharted
trail
of our bodies.
Dialogue
m: I undress you,
petal by petal,
in the dim light of
an ice torch
that melts your eyes,
bluer than mine;
floating, on the
swamp
of kiss-quilted skin,
on the tender flesh
of the oyster.
f: I turn my eye up,
and affix it to the
storm
of our shadows
on the vault of the globe,
faint streaks of stars
for crystal crepuscules,
plummeting over a
mirror of bubbles.
m: I curl up
inside the palm of
your hand,
in a cut of the
crevasse
where foam roars
fertile
of you, and scream
until breathless
your sharpened nails.
f: Now your stem,
crippled, cries
warm dew; and with
your lifted finger
you point to our
motionless shadows,
coiled up on the
chandelier.
Dialogue
m: Tightening the
trigger,
twisting the elastic
bend around the pin
to charge up my hell,
killing with a sperm
bullet.
: Obscene bodies of
solitude
clinging to the
umbilical chord
of desire
(murky metaphysical
animal),
bodies desecrated by
thought,
injected with mystic
shivers.
m: Falling in the trap
ravaged by jaws.
: Look for a wing, a
stone,
a strip of sun from
which to talk to me,
without shame, with
the tip of your gaze
until from the edge
of our coitus shoots
creation.
f: Dive your arms in the
air,
m: We never end
f: opaque plates of
pain,
m: of falling
f: mute stones of death.
m: in the abyss.
Second Part: Apeiron
Monologue
m: Do you remember
the hooked beak of
that crest
steep above reefs of
ruby;
the twin silences of
that night,
two drops of blood on
a stroll
through the veins of
the medieval borough?
and the rocks thrown
in the clot
of waves from the
emptied beach;
the quartz swans that
we dissolved
feather by feather in
the lake;
the vortex of
creeping antennas
on the roofs, which
we felt vibrate
in tune with us and
the sunset;
the blossoms of homes
clinging
to the barren
wrinkles of the cliffs?
us, wanderers in the
atlas
which life leafs
through
and highlights.
Intermezzo
A hurricane of stars
on this crystal night
orbits furiously over the steep
tortuous and narrow alleys,
crushed by the stone walls
of churches and palaces that centuries
of names could not change.
The crowd chattering in the promenade
fulfills the most sacred of rituals
pawning itself to the eternity
of silences, detritus to which
the bedlam of the stroll gives
a demented and ferocious voice.
Unbeknownst to all, a wave
underneath the porches and inside the decrepit
doorways advances and swells,
like a ghost with the same accent
brandishing its claws everywhere:
the swarming footprint of spirals,
in an eclipse of ashes and bells,
from the nefarious storm above.
Dialogue
f: I am afraid of
flying,
shivers of fakir
jolt me: I tighten
the band over my
eyes.
: But the miracles that
fill
the square, shavings
of sun...
f: the crowd a giant
mocking me without
shame,
: idols of stone,
beggars,
fossil icons, in
concentric
spheres of ivory...
f: Your face shines
on a tinfoil leaf,
and the magic words
you pronounce for me
escort my dreams
in that sea of
sparkles.
: Picking a flower of
ash
from the stake: s/he
loves me, s/he loves me not...
f: In your eyes I read
a poem that will last
for the rest of my
life.
: backwards in time,
alcove,
cavern, ravine of
lava.
f: Holding your hand
I will resume my
journey
from where I had
suspended it;
and I will fly.
Dialogue
: The ocean, in all its
spectral inutility,
sends
skeletons of algae
and cyclops
wrecked on the reef
(in the transparent
sheath
our compass continues
its clock-like
motion).
m: To catch the radiant
clouds
hanging like ripe
clusters
or like sharp cirrus
from the sky.
: The distance smeared
with blood,
of drunken and
frenzied seagulls
that fumble fan-like.
They dig where they
have hidden,
extract emptiness
from the air,
throw memories out in
space.
The flight grazes the
wave
in the many nameless
dwellings
of their eternal
childhood.
m: Pebbles make mute
circles
in the blinded water.
The gaze catches them
fitfully
at the bottom of
gravel of sun,
of putrid tangles of
root.
: The footprints on the
beach stop
in front of the gate
that did not open.
m: I turn the winch of
the anchor
under the upturned
sail.
: In order to decide
the route?
Intermezzo
We have no news yet
of the site where we have not
by chance arrived, harbor
or limit who knows, perhaps
just a transfer stop between
one shore and the other,
from one isle to the other
(on this side it’s ash
not sand the coastline
and spaces without borders
searching without finding
places with no name).
Dialogue
m: Exhausted by the pure
sun of the hills,
this journey in the
transparent obscurity
halts on the
threshold of the city.
f: My fate in a
different manner will speak
to the dusty toy
of worn out snake
skin
which, bearing my
name and face,
already thinks of
sailing away
like a star at
sunset.
: I freed myself
from the tangle of
inert arms
which exploited my
body
for their macabre
rites.
Now, in the cold
shroud
of this last
darkness,
just like the deep
beat
of the heart,
overflowing
with endless ripples,
runs on tinfoil waves
towards the free
shore,
louder thump
in the silence the
distant steps,
inexistent, on
abandoned paths.
Third Part: Nil
Dialogue
m : There is something
important,
on which my future
depends,
that I should tell
you, but, I know,
I will not find the
courage
to tell you.
There: I told you.
f : Then you know where
to find me,
or anyway how to find
me,
or at least if to
find me,
if to run away from
me or shun me,
in that labyrinth of
“ifs”
in which you all got
lost.
Dialogue
m: My secret singing to you
a musical staff of
kisses.
f: I heard beating in my
heart
the rhythm of your
voice.
m: The diamond
that will remain to
swim
in the orchid lakes
of your eyes.
f: That evening
you took my hand,
and you’ve never
let it go.
m: Inside your eyes
how my thoughts
poured!
on your lips,
how crumbled the sand
of my reason!
Intermezzo
The barbwire of lights
surrounding the bay
ties the waves and the reefs
into a pact of secrecy,
a torture of reflexes and debris
that the enormous seaweed of clouds
propels towards the ocean.
Dialogue
f: Isn’t life perhaps
that which happens
behind our back
unbeknownst to us
while we attempt to
distance ourselves.
m: Or perhaps the
distancing itself?
: Even in the ending
the beginning goes
on.
Monologue
f: Oh crumb of universe
mirroring yourself
in the annihalated
blue
of my eyes,
each splinter that
you try to save
could finish you.
Monologue
m : One thing we have
understood
in the tears that we
have
dried on each other
with kisses
of cotton candy on
cheeks
red with joy and
shame:
that most important
is the cry
that we have not yet
cried!
Monologue
f : There is no page in me
that has not already
been written by you.
Monologue
m: Each of these tears
is another bit of you
that penetrates me.
Monologue
: You fell asleep
inside a word.
Monologue
m: (Eternity is
transparent:
on the other side I
see neither memory
nor time).
f: No other places to go
exist.
m: (I shiver, alone, at
the void)
Monologue
m: You are
this poem,
and you are about
to end.
Dialogue
f: And your gaze
which guided me
towards the sun
like a flight of
seagulls,
now I lose it,
I feel forever,
in a wind of light,
violent and blinding.
not lighthouse but
mirror;
in a spot inside you
that I can’t see, but
I sense,
a black hole in which
I plunge
without even having
the strength
to see it reflected
or magnified,
but only capsized and
faded;
as if I lived inside
binoculars,
between one lens and
the other,
between two identical
tears.
m: From you
I did not have
even the time of a
smile;
yet it was enough to
understand
how far I still have
to walk,
how far is what I am
looking for,
and how hidden from
all the rest;
how alive I am.
f: And finally
you take me by the
hand,
along the faintest of
sunrays,
because this was
perhaps
our destiny,
to walk
where nobody else
would even see
the path.
Monologue
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