A Generosity
This is a dance where steps aren’t learned for it to be (“I’ll take everything by surprise”) and it doesn’t resign itself to halfhearted talk, now that the wind carries the smell of ploughed earth and shouts out things as if they existed and they come (“See, you don’t have to choose anymore”) toward the splendor of swimming, an improvised fate, which reveals itself later in the thick of the current but in silence, silence, testing.
On the Point
Now that I speak of you without naming you . . . only now . . . beyond analysis . . . where nothing is whole . . . but acts . . . I say . . . try . . . from the beginning . . . don’t fix . . . don’t figure on anybody . . . others can’t sustain an embrace . . . try . . . don’t negotiate . . . don’t prepare . . . don’t last . . .
Largo Afternoon
Now canoes are crossing the river
movement
in exuberant sunlight, and looking
shuts down reason
where this death is not simply a fading away
but being too, briefly,
on the edge of joy
which opens and lightly bears
an offer in the glimmer of a drop
and comment is excluded
when river banks in the morning
bring their strength
messenger of a name, listening,
conveying the body’s will, the imminent caress
looking living here
the intact season
has time to last
but pushes beyond
without rummaging through rubble
and calls for writing
that isn’t noticeable.
Where Everything Is Connected
Being called, it’s never dark here, it’s always later, amid obligations, on trams, sinking into coats with things that need to be finished--everything. And even now rain on glossy windows can’t be nature or history but an episode that every winter knows how to repeat living and circular while everything demanded a different attitude which believes in each thing without second-guessing it, a lightness in the cells, a smile in the right place . . . . . . intensities, only viscous intensities between mother and mamma’s voice like these sidewalks that try to divide but join with the cars and this vice of recognizing, and its commands, voice useless, in the midst of a storm, which is kissed, kissed . . . kissed . . . Via Pacini. It’s raining, heavier and heavier. Someone asked me the time
Another Time
This is the unique revolt that doesn’t understand a thing, delays to be present, sizes up and says, “Look, I made time last” but time is a story, an unjust story, the joy that arrived late now that things don’t hide and the riverbed is no longer a secret everything is certain now it’s there, unique, too unique to be present and yet this meadow really exists-- these low tufts, even if there’s no measurement. Every time boats cross the water, segments that demand their circle and someone asks who have you become, who do you love now, and feels the same, or would like to . . . but repeats the words for never, their crepuscular violence which sees everything, but finds nothing lukewarm soup shared at the same table cooled by the ignorance of those who drink not to waste, and waste everything even the defeat sung by another, always by another, who takes their place, mercifully and tries to live: today words really don’t echo off the wall that protected them, in a bet won because abandoned early: today, for the first time they wanted to triumph.
“The only compensation for your loss? Being unable to know its exact limits”
“Shut up. You only talk to forget.” There were no walls and phrases disappeared in the wind. “You know my name signifies: I’ve changed” and then there’s no silence, she says, if you realize, there’s no love at the end of a memory. The shadow of the houses has disappeared in this exterior of trucks and lime and the space is too much for words to be there. “You didn’t invent the joy, you’re not smart enough . . . you despair because what you do becomes . . . ” And these trees, increasingly sparse the wide roads in the northern part of the city fog covering everything, footsteps “But you can’t go on like this for long . . . ” and hands are damp, like the grass, beyond the road still, they don’t touch, they’ll never be sentimental. “All you’ve done is waste time. Start, for once, with what you’ve got left.”