Poetryzine magazine presents the selected poems from the “Alimono” poetry book by the Italian poet Chiara Catapano
I
Judging by how things go along the ridge of life
I will soon have to reckon with what tilts the balance
Far beyond any sense of measure.
On my deathbed, I would like them to read me Elytis:
No Christ better than Maria Nefeli could anoint my forehead
Before the black reaches me with my last breath.
Take me to Oxopetra and leave me there lying on the cliff
Like an open oyster.
Let the air scatter me, lest I be weaned by the worms deep down:
Let Nature be my shadow, and secretly absolve me
Although I may – for even a single day – have found that concreteness is evil.
We would only need to shed opinions like our clothes at night:
Instead, here we are, still, imploring each other’s approbation
For how we bite into the freshly plucked fruit.
There is no religion that does not include a secret violation
In the secret chambers of faith.
I closed my eyes as if by miracle.
It was January, and a passage has already opened in the summer:
My mistake is to force a single time upon things
And then live badly, in rhythm with the darning needle.
In silence man gathers wild plants from the white rock,
And the poet names them:
And in the interval between the act and the word eternity lives a thousand and
A thousand times over,
Until the icon’s very gold reveals your countenance painted by God
On the panel in the wood of the cross.
Let’s do with it now. I will abandon fear at the crossroads
And there with a light hand accept the Sphynx’s burden
And the questions that remain valid after all is revealed.
Thebes is shut inside a plague of ignorance, no siege so final
To knock down the walls and overcome the starving city.
We are alive by pure chance: luminous divinity rarefied in equations
Or laid down with velvet and purple in the farthest of far-off skies,
You shall forever bear our name.
We seek understanding
Lest we be answerable to our own selves.
IV
Forgive me, barbarous young creature, if I am still distressed
when I utter your name: forgive us humans for our white despair. Dance on the bitter tongue of the letters M E D E A
Pain’s effortless approach.
Your shadow on my head
Is like swallowed shell breaking in pelican-beak. To leave these shores and always return to them like strangers
Corrupts your nature no less than it does the hawk’s, Now swimming in the light above our heads. Medea, thinnest voice bent like a pale cheek on lover’s shoulder Lost, And on the children’s tender flesh, They too departed like vessels without a helmsman. By how things go in life’s furrow How they are lodged inside there, eternally – In no religion will you find a remedy to this. Your body is the tabernacle you sought, the slaves to be set free Your senses weighed down by veils of doubt. All the gods of the poet listened to us, Listened and fulfilled us, and yet We grope tiredly in the same darkness: You and I, Medea, escorted by Alexander’s phalanxes The heart afflicted like the soil after a storm. We fail to grasp the reason for days of such deep despair.
VI
“Then I entered my empty house.”
Ulysses comes back after a hundred years. Returns to his empty house where all have died: Telemachus dead, the stucco of endless journeys in search of his father, Penelope dead, hanging from the wood of the loom-cross of waiting; The Suitors dead and nobody to recall any tyranny or smell of slavery. The trusted Eumaeus also dead; and Argo, who won’t see his master again. One hundred years, and he’s fresh, vigorous as ever: nobody waiting for him, nobody
Who at last learned how to tame death. The rooms are of wind: light unstitches his eyelids. Behind the steps beaded with ancient nights, our memory; Behind the mewling of statues as corrupt as children to war, There stands our dwelling. My youth... I am not alone under the archway: beside me grim slave traffickers
Grasp in their fist a few feathers of the quivering wagtail, And their palms scratch my live door to the heart. My chambers. A childish deafness cuts milk into Artemis’ nipples; An age that’s worth a lifetime, incomprehension’s sharp scythe. There, I see Maria Nefeli come forward, a snowflake that shifts the balance of the world.
This is the fate I’ve pulled onto my lap together with the thread and the needle
So that one day somebody may cut off my entire knowledge.
Thus Maria Nefeli unfolds the wagtail’s tiny wings upon her legs. He speaks to a shade. The sea has corroded all inside him. There is no destiny that can dwell in time’s motionless gesture
like in this my home.
This shelter: it doesn’t even carry memories of war.
Ah, to be undying! While all we cherish goes missing.
The house, like a closed eyelid, quivering.
In absence, what darkness?
Someone has lit candles in the uninhabited rooms,
He waits for the least opening, a flowering
After wandering so much.
Here is man’s first root, it suggests Maria Nefeli:
The first root is salt.
Others follow it, and like solid fingers they grasp
Earth’s resurrection.
VII
So you think illusion real?
At Madaba the sun rose like a gunshot
And we never noticed it.
Doves soared high, their pale wings that better comprehend
How forbidding is the silence of a god.
Inside us grew some manner of discomfort:
For you, who were from there, your people shut inside their cloaks
Crossed the desert who knows how many times
To reach this unconquerable dream.
Tell me, what did it mean?
For me, a stranger everywhere, and here no less than at home,
And Saint George here, too,
Who kills the dragon here, too,
Wherever I go the dragon of dream doesn’t die.
Here, too.
And yet...
Eyes boiled in fear, but it was the fever of dream:
How many grew around that dream, soon they wrung their hands.
Ulysses presses a piece of wet paper to his breast,
Remembers his old companions and his loved ones
All fallen (what difference if at home or in battle)
And I who, soon bringing him to my lips,
Had adored my sky.
The secret under my nose:
What point was there in leaving, in dressing up in war’s midst?
Skinny, distorted cerulean letters rain down, corpses under the walls of Troy.
In my dream – shouts Ulysses – I thought I saw a little better,
And you, Maria Nefeli, where were you?
VIII
One conveys something by means of an action.
Your rugged man’s hide, time slipped it off you.
With these words, Helen speaks: anthropos, she addresses me.
Then came the seasons, but they barely grazed our temples;
We missed the parting, then we could have understood,
Understood and loved.
(Useless fairytales, I won’t believe one word you say.)
And yet, how lovely was the dream! How white and clear its breast.
Hail to you, pure Helen! Hail to your perfection.
Intact, a shell never opened.
In Crete I too was breath, I too
Desecration of a shade and a name.
You and the idol sing with a thousand cicada voices, high over the wine-colored sea;
No matter if on the pillow you mix sweat with dream,
No matter...
It was August 1999, they gave us goggles,
Called us outside, in the open, students and professors;
Between Gallos and Panorama, we all held our eye gear,
The light choked suddenly, for a moment its shape went missing.
The sun was only more bloodless but a chill rose from the tombs.
I asked someone where its sounds had gone to
(They too vanished together with the light, came the answer.)
Under our eyes – undoubtedly – an action
reached its conclusion.
X
As to the children, they shall be rootless at birth.
I gazed into the distance, the chasm of my soul,
Ionian columns cross it: they shone
In the sun’s restless glitter.
When the freshness of morning entered my breath
Then I understood. I understood and loved.
Like all I searched for the way back, but it was mine a little more,
For inside me fluttered dream’s violet shadows.
Helen meanwhile pierced me through and through
With her fate of a woman twice abducted.
There is no other man in this world can love his sad fate
Like this.
For her too is the house – the rocks that roll darkly
Inside the garden.
The rooms are also for you, Egyptian slave, soft creature of breath:
Both shall I protect one hundred years more –
For death, if it has not conquered me yet,
Has already come.
Rethymnon, open vein:
In it I glimpse the vain forces of all of Greece.
And on my body the unhappy infection coagulates
Billions of tiny angry fiords.
Drunken summer, drunken aftermath.
There’s a man playing the oud every morning under our windows.
I see and don’t see, I’m blind under the light,
I end up sharpening a knife inside me.
Maria Nefeli, vapour and gold on days of ivory,
You leaned out of violence, out of the imprecise.
XI
I came not to Troy, I was only a phantom.
And yet with words, nothing, nowhere,
From top to bottom: nothing.
I grew up convinced of growing but motionless and backwards in time
Thus was I moving forward.
From top to bottom, bound to a thread
Hand and foot from top to toe
And upside down:
This is fate observed at my latitude.
And then the Notos that blows, stripped me
Of my name.
That wave under the fingernails – depth, a bare mention:
The negligible I keep hidden
just enough for us to be saved.
Saved, and the dream melted away,
And from the eyes you shut like stones in my hand
Speaks the ancient icon I once was.
Helen... you whisper, gurgling at my ear:
Pregnant with wind I answer with symbols.
My mortal life, my dream!
Scrapped off presence whose resin drips at one’s feet.
Phantom, empty shape
Substance without a sharp edge or a footprint:
To which do I belong, to which go the bereavement and the pain?
I sink into two dissimulations,
there isn’t one spring in which I can at last let my
image dissolve.
An oiled word, suitable to my fluid speech:
Each section of my body commands my other.
The time marked by the body is a time of war,
My dear.
Raging iambics arch over the eyelashes
Words crashing echo my dumb speech;
Like a slow army the empty assonance advances
steadily, patiently, filling me with its spoken-unspoken.
It has uttered me on the cutting verge of reason,
Unfleshed and cut off:
Articulated as a breath of crystal pain
Melted glass in the Olympian workshop
A god made my lot twofold.
Never, never came I to Troy:
That event was the business of a shade.
Комментарии