Five Poems by Davide Trame.
Belonging
Now I am sunk and strong
in the morning and in the earth’s damp
after the rain,
a line of thick haze engulfs the hill,
the soaked field and the brown last leaves
crowd into my gaze.
I breathe the fullness of the sirocco’s silence,
the morning that settles in with sky and mud.
I am the perspiring hill,
I come from the womb of red loam
and white-washed stones and bones,
I am settled in the frame of swollen-still clouds
and leaves that stick to my ground
with their slow wrist and fist
and mist that grasps the breast.
The buzzard beats its hard wings,
heavy wings that wait for the relief of a thermal,
but there’s no thermal in this calm
and they beat on and on, nevertheless.
Sunk and sure and slow in the air’s depths.
In my staring breath.
* * * * *
The Bloom
( while reading “Suite Française” by Irène Némirovsky)
I am in the child’s eyes and on her
pollen-scented cheeks, on the loamy earth
smeared on her fingers, compact
under her nails, I am in her curls
flashing like wheat.
She had entered the spell in the drone
of the bumblebees, the light’s drone
in the grass, the boundless blue crossed
by the sunlight’s throat.
She caught some words of the talk
between the French wife and the German officer
and she heard well the woman’s final “no”,
the rest she sensed, a hidden “yes”
that had lingered in the May field
despite the acres of rubble and smoke,
a “yes” that had echoed in the lit
perseverance of the bumblebees.
Their drone sunning my breath now
in this rainy day, filling the silence
with the grip of thousands of tiny legs
on flowers.
* * * * *
View
Dawn comes at last, late in the winter solstice,
at least it’s a clear day, a breath of blue
is rising down there, rose-veined, a silent,
slow, steady spreading, with rags of dark
like feathers from a still dark horizon:
my view now from the train window.
Thoughts, words, trickling on it
like shadows of fingers,
you, eyes riveted to our garden, their light
calm like dew, but like dew with a sparkling
that can be only urgent, earth eyes
with sailing, staring roots,
-I feel I don’t have much time,
I don’t want to waste any-
and I, trying to dissimulate
what is too crystal clear,
I, trying my best
sidelong glance.
Now I breathe, the light
is opening the land, like clarity,
the quiet now of what was said.
Time is not to waste.
The note of the landscape.
Its pearly nakedness.
* * * * *
At The Grave
I am pouring the water into the bowl,
up to the brim
and cutting the base of the flower stems,
I smell the fresh green, this renewed
breath of earth.
I want them to stand
straight and tight, a rich knot
in their lilacs, yellows and whites
and like a silent joy the fist
of a blood-red rose saying-
here I am, to the light-grey granite.
On leaving, I catch myself once more
saying –goodbye- to a name
and feeling accomplished.
Like the accomplished, rich and severe
wind in the cypresses.
I know, deep down, the illusion of being.
Or, simply afraid, I pretend to know it.
I want to be aware that
I am no more here than they are,
there under the granite.
But I still feel so much here.
Still. A flicker of awareness
glad to have greeted
a name in a new thicket of flowers.
* * * * *
Being Here
The strand stretched and washed clear
by the tight wind’s hand.
Along the blossoming waves
the churning skin of the foam
overcoming itself.
You can wait. You can talk of it.
But nothing is
like being here under its eyes.
The immanence of a fierce flower.
A tiger a few steps on your left
that doesn’t need to attack yet.
And you are moved
by what can devour you,
just because.
The teeth and paws
of the present
in its grasping stare.
* * * * *
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