Heaven

Where walls and stones assist you
and envelop the rustling of your voice,
take Last of the Summer Wine
and the wood-panelled fortress
of the reading room, walls that cradle
the joy of an unending gossiping,
a still point flowing in time.
And the slate hue of the row of houses outside,
the streets where cars, bikes, all gears imaginable
can get disassembled or crashed
just like in a child’s play on a merging horizon.
Where you don’t feel guilty in being idle.
Like the drowsy emperor at dinner
lying in his gold, leaning on one elbow,
encircled by massive marble walls
pregnant with a bee-hive of laughs and cries
and merged in the sea-roar, crossed further on
by shivers of light, currents
like those rippling on your dog’s fur
caught in his dream-tides.

FOGHORNS

1
At the water’s edge you always hear
the same near pressing elephant trumpeting
into the invisible air’s heart,
you imagine a gaze still amazed
despite the looming blindness
and, brushing your side, its tusks
on the verge of being uncovered
revealing crying rags of sunlight.

2
You love their insistence, bringing all the unseen near
on the bank of the canal along the sand-bar
facing cotton wool emptiness, the air
a marvelled pressure like fingers
carrying the silence of weightless pearls.
This rhythmic hum of sky is searching for your centre,
waiting to give mellowness to your heartbeat,
voicing your belief in the light and the present you relish
when you sense and touch the cells of the honeycomb,
the lungs and womb of your spreading shore.

GAP

Getting ready to examine you in these final days
and face a morning full of words and silences
measuring your knowledge and your tension,
I skirt along a meadow of tall trees,
the early morning is cool, after the night’s storm
you breathe the mountains and something farther,
much farther and more precise than any word;
it has nothing to do with anything
I will be able able to ask you about
but now it’s everything I want to.

SNEEZE

Your old country home, the huge moths bumping
against the lamp on the lintel with its yellow light,
the straw mattress where you slept as a child,
and that itch in your nose before going to bed,
your sneezing in the corners, then your waking up
in the dead of night, breathing with the mouth,
fumbling among silent moths for a handkerchief
stepping barefoot on the screeching floorboards.
In the day your clogged nose as you played
and panted in the field by the hedge’s dusty gold
under the widespread silvery eye of the mountain
by the wrinkled cornstalks among shafts of dusty sunlight,
the rustling, stinging, slightly burnished bounty.
It was a god or a ghost that wished to make you burst,
to shoot maybe into the eagle’s staring hush,
as it is now here while you are on the verge of a sneeze,
eyes watering, closing, sunrise sky flashing,
stubble like a scattered debris of arrows
and rows of vines with red leaves in the haze,
scythes of God’s relentless gaze.

THE SEA