Translated from the Italian by Patrick Williamson

From “A city called six o’clock in the morning” (Edizioni della Meridiana, 2009)

I’m hovering on the crooked balcony
and you come with your soul on your shoulder

you don’t know what to say
you come from where the birds play the lottery

with borrowed wings
come and say: there’s no time

I’ve already put the pasta in
my love.

*

I would make the dawn and sky lines
out of the marks left by the pillow
on your newly-awake face, wonder
as you emerge from sleep and come like birds
by day, your laughter is calling the good
by name, you lift up flower nets with your gaze.
Fire and borders, yellow evenings carry the breeze
of your breath, I feel you exist in the wind
that bends umbrellas, in the chest open
against the night that descends on you.
I want to be with you the wave that rises
and becomes cloud, be like the bright pollen
on the fields and light that frees the corners.

__

From “Give me your news and a kiss to everyone” (Interno Poesia, 2018)

Never forget you’re alive
even when the room sets
and voices become distant
even when the pain covers you
closes your face and halts
the film of the children, the few lovers.
You never forget that you’re here
where there is no death
and the show doesn’t leave you in peace.
The sun multiplies
beyond the mountains, new doors
opening in the eyes of meetings
and this heart of mine beats only
while your breath rises.

*

I’m on the brink of something happening
at the bus stop
the church could collapse
with its bell tower, the pizzeria sign
or the sky split open and show us
the spectacle finally
of an open paradise of lightning
and angels. I’ve got my phone in my hand
my mother could call me
or another voice that no longer exists.
I am sinking with my holed
Converse in the mud of the moment
and I’m waiting but maybe it’s already happened
the No. 14 come and gone, it’s gone already
all the enthusiasm.
Quake earth, move wind
so I may raise the cross
of being and finding, among these ruins,
the luminous fragments that composed
the splendour, among the rays.

*

The hands of those you love
are fountains of light
you hold them tightly as handles
in storms and falls.
The hands of those you love
are houses to shelter in
and pipes and tunnels and cables
where love runs
without stopping and branches
rise up and pierce
clouds and stars, they’re bread
and soups, and flights, ships.
The hands of those you love
not even death
takes them out of your hands.

*

My friends are strange people
and I don’t see them very often
they visit the day like iguanas
and at night they forget
where they’ve parked.
They do jobs they don’t understand
they always have their phones out
and in their eyes the eyes
of when they built houses
with sofa cushions.

To recognise each other we open shells
that make lightning flash,
we find them in our pockets without knowing it.

My friends laugh like water
and they broke a thousand screws to get here
they unscrewed the spiral of galaxies
drank beer with the angels
and they say it was an accident.
But I know that they came
to empty the pockets of tears
to show a heart that sings
from the balconies of sleep.

__

Photo credit: Dino Ignani