The thrill of all loves passes.
The trill of the blue nightingale
in Paradise is everlasting.
Only those who can see the black sun
of melancholia
glimpse the blue nightingale
as invisible as blinding.
The golden apples of Aphrodite
were just quinces.
Stay golden, mind of mine, you did well.
Stay in that pensive mood of the sea
glittering at early morning.
Be the soft susurrus of the rain
on the mossy brownstones.
The swallows bear good tidings
from the black sun.
.
In high spring the apples shine
onto the pathways leading along
the yellow seasides of Devon.
The cows lowing on the scorched grass.
Nearby a gunshot started a flock
of fieldfares and herons.
I know the name of every bird
but not their songs.*
Shine the apples green into the dewpond
a cloudspotter scrutinizes the bare sky
so blue a peasant woman
-tired of laundry and peeling spuds-
is about to read poems of John Clare.
The lavender scent of the drizzle
makes her sob like a child.
Between a silent pack of wolves on the hill
and a yellow moon over the shoreline
Aphrodite smiles.
*John Betjeman
I
Forlorn in London with no Virginia
melancholy descends on me:
I miss when she folds a green shawl
around her shoulders like a peacock
preening her train of feathers.
Oh when I am old and dying, Virginia,
I wish you read Orlando aloud to me,
you my artichoke flower towering
among yellow dahlias,
my anchor entangled in gold nuggets
at the bottom of the sea:
endless stormy sea of delusion.
I touch the green raincoat, the brooch,
the hot water bottle you left(after love)
in my Pink Tower.
In this endless stormy sea of masquerade
you remain
as the brightest beacon...
...but I did leave Virginia standing
on her doorstep
in a misty London,
trying to open like a desert flower
under a cloudburst.
So there is blur on the edge of wisdom:
this poem.
There is a blur on the edge of this poem:
myself.
I am writing you now from Cairo or maybe Teheran?
or rather Beirut? Wherever but sipping
demijohns filled with Shiraz wine:
I definitely ignore where I am
when daydreaming of you.
II
Enisled on the land of our last hopes
you rumple my hair, knot my emerald pearls
dazzling into the gloom.
The silver fish of your soul
slipping through my fingers.
I in purple Turkish tunic
by the gas fire,
You in orange and black dress
and a straw hat
with feathers like Mercury's wings.
"Please come and bathe me in serenity again"
"Don't rumple the hair of Sybil,
oh Virginia, don't"
You, waving at the doorstep in blue apron
to my blue Austin going through the meadows
toward the lighthouse of your smile.
"Greece with you in May"
-I shouted
but I saw you no more that year...
"Please when you are in the South
think of me"
Isfahan with its blue domes
it is not more stunning
than your blue apron
waving adieu.
III
Forlorn in London with no Virginia,
she has kept me in thrall on my knees
kissing her ghost like a golden relic
in a Florentine church
"Fra Angelico, you remember,
painted on his knees"
London is too cold, full of funerals,
influenza, stray cats and floozies.
I long to be in Monk House,
near the bust of Venus in the garden
or sitting on the floor by you,
no undergarments,
flashing my legs
while Leonard guts the herrings
and plants hollyhocks.
Oh how I relish on this wanton lust
even at seeing the runs
and dirt of your stockings.
London smells of stale lipstick,
manure and petrol.
"Life is only a passing of phantoms,
a crowing of cocks"
you say while playing about my pearls
as a child with his marbles...
...but I only hear, across the marshes,
the heavenly sound
from harps made of cryshantemums.
"She never looked like Sappho"*
I
Take me dear Vita
from London to Bagdag not to Sevenoaks.
Motor me along in that car so blue
as your silk undergarment.
Come round in the owling time, stark naked
and be to my thighs what the fern
is to the spring breeze.
Stop the grey watches of the night.
Fill the Sussex downs
with the larks of your kisses,
with the smell of red hibiscus in bloom.
Dear Vita,
let's sit under the laburnums
and watch a white horse
munching in the marsh.
Take me faraway from the hoary
old ladies and gents in tweeds.
II
The beauty is entirely colour
and you are entirely pink and green
-that's a lark
to my soul here
in the gloomy Hebrides
talking to gannets and clouds.
Now I smell geraniums,
earth mould, grilled salmon.
I dance with the gannets,
with the hissing shadow of your smile
"Oh you make such a figure
in the forest
coming out of a glade,
yellow, golden.
Oh you old serpent,
cold moonshine,
how you coil in your basket of red fig leaves."
I am going to smell the waves
redolent of the secret rose
between your white thighs.
Now the sky is like a Canaletto
because I daydream of you.
III
Leonard's clipping the yews, my Jew,
and I trim the blue lupins you gave me
some moons, some caresses ago
when you gathered my hair unwashed
in a bun at the back of my head
reeking of mushroom and haddock.
Notwithstanding you kiss my greyish locks
and the wet-pink porpoise throbbing
inside the secret rose.
Leonard's clipping the yews, my Jew,
but I long for hibiscus, the South Seas,
groves of lilac, acres of peach-blossom
in Persia with you.
IV
Mozart on the gramophone,
a blast of lightning
over the Mount Caburn,
a white owl just crossing the meadow.
"Limelight is bad for me, Donkey West,
the best light for my love is twilight."
My fingers slip into your bossom
like a squirrel among brown nuts.
"The dream of my life: to be a tropical fish
swimming in a submerged forest"
I open the top button of your yellow
jersey of zingaro women who read
palms and cards and stars
by the sickle side of the moon.
And pull off your trousers of Abyssinian
Empress seduced by an Ecuadorian slave.
There is a green caterpillar in your hair.
I ate it...
Not the lively squirrel already
lost in the deepest rained forest of you.
Mozart on the gramophone,
the white owl
is crossing the water meadows
afresh.
I pry into the stars
through my telescope,
none has the brightness
of your violet eyes
at noon.
V
More than Tottenham Court Road
I prefer nightingales. orange flowers.
Have me lunch under cypresses, frogs
chanting to the Italian moon
like a glimmery lemon in the sky...
Lucca,
San Gimignano,
Piacenza.
Bury me, Vita, in Monte Oliveto
where the bones walk and talk
the language of oxen, streams
and olive groves,
my soul becoming the flames
of blue candles to the Madonna for rain.
Volterra,
Lerici,
the purple bay where Shelley
was drown into the stars..
.Spotorno.
Dogs.
Iridiscent flowers.
I forgot Whitsuntide.
Even Leonard's forgotten,
not the sunrise seen
from the Pink Tower
with you and a basket full of quinces.
Addio carissima sorella mia
I follow the instinct
of the artichokes for the sun,
and the sun for the vines leaves,
the scorching Dionysian earth.
I follow the purple sea,
the heady scent of pine and oleanders.
"I rang you up all for the sound of your lovely
voice like a bird piping through a hawthorn hedge
but heard only buzz buzz buzz"
I follow the aquamarine smell
of the waves(not my Waves)
frothing
melting
into the infinitude
of Shelley's ashes.
VI
Just when my mind is
in full fettle again
I begin to doubt in beautiful words.
Sparrows rising in flocks
from the Enbankment
at my usual hour between the lights
now walking across London
I remember the great joy of smelling
a dead horse in Athens
while the bees boomed over
the tomb of Agamemnon.
The systolic action of my heart is
too wild wild. wild
just when my body is
in full fettle again
why don't I see you now
from the top of Hampstead Heath?
But you are in the Indian Ocean
reading Proust or looking at whales.
I startle a big swan sleeping
on the misty river bank
just when I arise from dreams of thee
in the jolly fields of Kent
I begin to doubt in beautiful words.
None of them could ever describe
your red jersey dimming in lontananza
like the most melancholy sunset:
just when I long for love
two comma buttlerflies
copulate on the lilies,
but you never collected butterflies
and I am not destined to die
like a rose in aromatic pain.
VII
The music-box plays Daisy, Daisy
give me your answer, do.
Bad Vita,
bad wicked Vita,
don't go to Egypt,
stay in England, love Virginia,
take her in your arms.
Let's go to watch flamingos
in Richmond Park:
they are pink like the fig
you proffered me that night.
Virginia enjoys sitting with Vita
in Kew Gardens
under a cloudy sky to bicker on
feminism, Spanish wines
and copulation.
Bad wicked Vita, Vita:
give me your answer, do.
I didn't take chloral
this morning at 4:30,
in love of you didn't sleep
...and visioned you in my mind
in the nude,
stamping out hops in Kent,
brown as a satyr,
dancing a Negro rag...
Should I bloom a maiden once more?
Leonard's eating oysters by the apple trees.
*Between the Acts,1941
There are no more pedestrian muses
strolling by.
Now they roam about
in trendy scooters
and don't give a damn
to solitary poets
writing in coffee houses,
park benches.
They walk no more
in beauty. Unseen
they write the beauty by
waxing elegies to nature
to their own bodies.
They're their own muses.
Let's say a mirror
or rather an emerald stone
reflecting the Eternal City
wrapped in raging flames
as the ire of Vesuvius
enshrouds the Tyrrhenian waters..
Rome is burning:
the Porticus, the Circus Maximus;
the bustling Subura, the Argentilum,
the Velabrum, the fragant
gardens of Tiber...
The Caesar gazes at the sudden blaze
through an emerald stone like a mirror,
drinks a frothy wine in silver cup,
and recites the Illupersis
at the rhythm of a Greek zither...
He smiles at the green flames
engulfing the Eternal City to ashes.
Tipsy, slumberous in some kind of bliss,
He kisses the rosy fingers of effete boys
who gather round his horselaughing.
At last, the emerald stone solely reflects
the yawn of a worn-out Emperor.
the bad omen that portends to see
a famished wolf eating cinders
in the hands of Juno at sunrise.
The Speculum Majus of Vincent de Beauvais
consisted of four massive mirrors unfolding
as a catoptric theater
1) the Mirror of Nature
2) the Mirror of Knowledge
3) the Mirror of Moral
4) the Mirror of History
What we live along our existence
is only a magical approximation to reality:
deceptive epiphanies reflected on the incessant
mirrors of our daily grind.
Deceitful visions that gleam back to us
Nature, Knowledge, Moral and History.
I have no name.
Je m'appelle myself the wine
quaffed by Petrarch a rainy day in Avignon
while he kissed the blue aura of Laura
through alexandrine verses.
Je m'appelle either blackbird, watermelon,
Brahma, Sophia or Grasmere Lake...
Je m'appelle the sound of water
caressed by your hand that only exists
if time doesn't.
Je m'appelle Ominaeshi, Persimmon,Holden Caufield,
the rustle of the wind on the sunflowers.
the dialogue between the northern lights and the pinewoods.
Je m'appelle "mono no aware", "lacrimae rerum"
and sometimes they call me "toska" or white melancholia.
I was born a wandering minstrel,
they named me Random.
I was born male and female at once
and I should have called myself Orpheus
or primordial nymph.
Just at the moment of my birth
all the cats of the world mewed in unison,
all the dolphins leapt from the waves to the sunrise.
And just at the moment of my death
all the stellar cumuli of the universe will become
the one and unique star of my last laughter.
World-weary here am I
watching the slick green of saplings
at autumn.
The sun, by and by,
will be just a memory
of another day gone,
another waste light.
But dark withal
and so with rained soul
I can make something out
of the trilling thrushes
and the crystalline murmur
of ghosts and rivulets:
some truth renewing itself
unnoticed to the fold,
revealed only to
the world-weary people
at sunset.
I am son of myself
(like Empedocles)
Before I was plant, fish,
bird and maiden
(Like Empedocles)
So if I now jump off
to the upwelling
Etna magma
(like Empedocles)
which one is about to die?
Myself or my son?
Mutter, ich bin dumn ("Mother, I am a fool") Nietzsche
In Hyde Park a preacher took a pratfall up to the moon from his soapbox,
and everybody laughed in China.
Mary Magdalene mistook Jesus for a gardener. And Jesus, timely, plucked a rose.
Definition of glory: graveyard wherein the soil falls
upward instead of downward.
He wanted to leave this world through the main gate, in grand style, but eventually
popped off through a pop-hole.
He wanted to be laid to rest with his loved-ones, but ended up with the hated-ones.
In that country a poet was off his leash, and mauled another poet to death.
Studious-looking by the river the poet,
in reality only flicks through dirty mags.
Nobody gets shipwrecked twice in the same island.
Ignorance is recyclable. Knowledge, biodegradable.
It takes so long to be not an idiot, and only a second to become one again.
They wanted me to be an early riser to catch the worm...I was the worm.
Cadaver dogs still sniffing around in search of his missing soul
The universe is nothing more than an upscale dunghill. That's why in Ancient Egypt
they worshipped the dung beetle as a sacred beast.
"Je voudrais être un cochon: l'homme seul peut être ridicule". Paul Gauguin
The State is an Amusement Park full of over-rational children.
"The law is the Amusement Park of Pain" Louis F. Celine
"the beautiful fiction of the law" Charles Dickens
I am my own booty of my own piratical forays into myself.
Someone was tampering with the course of the universe when I was born.
In my late childhood, I was convinced that dwarves and cats-like the universe-
never die.
Impossible to poem the memories of all my imaginary loves.
"With an apple I will stun Paris"-said Cezanne.
I will stun London with a durian.
I've been always a wanderer around the words, not the world.
A skating minister stopped and pissed
over my blue bonfire.
Please mind the gaps between your steps and the clouds.
The words also get exhausted as the pilgrim's feet.
I was born at rest, unrest.
Today everything is quite similar to everything and nothing at the same time.
I am a defendant accused of being just me. The Devil's always offering
to be my lawyer pro bono.
Death by poetry is a kind of death by misadventure, that is, "accidental death caused
by a risk taken voluntarily"
"I'm going to do with ya what the moon uses to do with poets: ignoring'em."
Everywhere you come across idiots who believe themselves poets, and poets who deem themselves as God.
We are all putty in the hands of a playful and mischivous God.
We are all sitting ducks of the Fates.
""We know that the Muses were women, and we know every day of our lives that the Fates
are women" Charles Dickens
We are only status updates posted by God daily. And daily disappearing.
Nietzsche defined himself as "a fatality in pyjamas". I am the selfsame fatality but in boxers.
"Dieu etait un tres mauvais communicant" (Michel Houellebecq)
Every war that breaks out in this planet is a cut of God having a clean shave.
God takes a potshot at us every day.
God don't play dice with the universe but marbles.
I suspect God is a serial killer running away at light speed. He will never be caught.
God is a technocrat who trades in the stock market of suffering.
"In the beginning was the word"(John, 1:1)...
But God keeps flannelling on and on.
"J'attends Dieu avec gourmandise" Arthur Rimbaud
God, in the other life, was a stand-up comedian.
Written off as a suspect of murdering God,
the philosopher was declared caretaker God.
Earthquakes are the sneeze of the Devil.
"Satan's bet is still on" Alberto Manguel
There might come a time when all the human beings can be bound in brotherhood...The endogamy will do the rest.
Birds will never nest wherever people want.
And people will never know whatever birds think.
Humbleness hardly ever bloom in the genius as a rose-like virtue.
Rather as the last resource of the defeated.
Definition of life: a mighty polygraph that someone lays hidden in the words.
She told me: "I like you just the way you are". She should have told me, "I don't like the way you will be"
Tourists are the absent-minded inspectors of Hell.
"Tourists are souls doing penance" Adam Zagajewski
Hope is carnivorous.
Hope is a woman in broody urge who, sadly, becomes childless.
"The dead hunting and the alive, ahunted" Frank O'Hara
Death is an endless Sunday.
Many men deserve l'oubli but l'oubli deserves so many men?
I am my own scarecrow shooing away the thousand crows of my anxiety.
You searching for the exterior, and the exterior searching for you. Crisscrossed screams. The bridges burning.
I've just hit the nail that rounded off my crucifixion.
How do you intend to turn transcience into beauty if you don't know what is it as yet?
It is not about to get lost in the woods anymore but in the stars.
Falling apart piece by piece,
peace by peace
All books of poetry intend to be a clarifying footnotes of dreams.
"Surely the great use of poetry is its pleasure, not its influence
as religious or political propaganda." Sylvia Plath
The exile is born and die endlessly in a lifetime.
Impossible to unearth the gold of facts.
Fate is the mother of things.
This business of living is becoming, day by day, something quite spatial more than special.
They don't bring children to this world anymore but books.
He wrote his curriculum vitae in several heavy volumes,
and won the Booker Prize.
The world is a hankie teeming with virtual snot.
"The world seemed made of concentric circles of mockery" Susan Sontag
The present is always crammed with insurers of insecurity.
"Hey wooden boy, don't get so close to the flames", told off Pinocchio a tramp warming his hands at a bonfire.
Anyone scared of the unsteadiness of the ground has the right to believe himself an orangutan, and never to climb down from the trees.
"Are we alone in the whole universe?", asked me a tobacconist while I nibbled on a bacon sandwich.
What is the point of knowing if we are alone in the whole universe, if I don't know why I am alone in myself?
I've just decided to live off-the-grid and off-the-greed.
On a wicker rocking chair
grandma takes a breather at noon
fanning her jolly smile of moon
with a piece of cardboard, the air
teeming with glowworms and dust.
The fan stained with sunflower
oil.
In the porch shaded by a bower
of orange jasmine,
she smells the gust
of perfumed rain and mangos and sea.
Flies and words land upon her fan.
She talks with herself sipping tea:
"What a scorcher"-and stares to the sun
glowing red through the sky. On the rocking
chair my grandma nurses a nap stroking
my straggly hair, a black cat.
She beguiles
the boredom with a big moony smile.
"Thinking of rodhodendron forests in Piccadilly"
(Virginia Woolf)
"In broad nightlight
tonight
conversing with the realm of darkness
my words have taken in the colour
of rhododendrons
bordering late-blooming paths,
abandoned castles,
mossy bridges where the crows
land and brood at sundown.
In broad-dimming nightlight
shall not come the moths
to flit around the tired splendour
of my words,
words tinged with the pale pink
through which, oftentimes,
the faces of memory
entice Hebe into the forest of Elvedon,
faces as pure as the stork flight at dawn,
faces that whisper me with voices
of blue-girl in darkness...
this is you around, Percival
this is you, Rhoda?.
faces that mutter me beyond any matter
through a seraphic language
of wave or ringdove.
And I whisper back to them
like buttlerflies smouldering
in the candle flame to be ashes"
He lost his soul
walking into the woods
but he realized the woods
itself was his soul
and while losing his bearings
in the dew-laden thicket of larches.
pines and elms
he came across a golden bough:
Aeneas-wise, tried to break it
and somehow to descend into the Averno
and bestows it upon Persephone hands
in return of kissing her asphodel-scented nipples.
He couldn't tear the golden bough
apart from the bark
and it dawned on him that bough
was not his fate nor even descending
into the Averno...Let alone
to kiss gloriously a goddess
in the inglorious darkness.
A roll of fog over the downs
smelling of sea.
A flock of green starlings
outpace the sun,
the sun still yawning
among the wet aloe fronds.
A mopish bobcat stares
at the fleece-like clouds,
his slick yellow eyes
plumb the depths
of beyond...
And there, uphill, nearly floating
over the fog in motion,
with invisible scissors
I snip the stars.
All the monkeys of Emile Borel
now are tapping away
randomly
at my keyboard
pulling off the love poems
I was not ever talented
to write
(for thee)
A Claudian sunset
a punnet of fruits on the windowsill,
a white nag can be discerned
grazing afar along the horizon:
beacons of light in a benighted world.
Undulations of shaded valleys and reveries.
A moon-caressed gnomon
as the phallus of some forgotten god,
god combing the goldfields of memory
where, naked, cavort
all my past and imaginary loves.
Susurration of willows over the gleaming water,
stentorian voices of rivers that swell in the night,
the night coming down like a wound tiger
who stares, melancholy, the orange gloam of dusk:
beacons of light in a benighted world.
The dreams I didn't dare to make real
have turned into crows.
She turned up all of a sudden
as a broken fingerpost announcing
the safest path to nowhere.
And she smelled so good
in the summery breeze
as the poems I have no written yet.
But she glanced at me like someone
that scrutinizes a face
of a missing person in a wall flyer.
On the tarmac, kissed by the rain,
still glistened the shadow of her last word.
In military fatigues, the poet
trains his metaphors
to survive banality, transcience, void.
Unfazed by the noise of defeat and rain.
Inebriated by his own daydreams.
Though the golden spark, lost,
and the undertow of sadness, stronger:
he does not raise yet the ad digitum
to the shadows.
He still dreams of swanning off
with a mermaid, even brushed by age.
A belle dame sans merci
Enthralling the path without path,
the preordained beauty of love
with deathless death and no love.
*
His uncertain voice
besought to a certain night:
'What's the smell of the hours passing?
Has the touch its own memory
as Keats said once?
Why am I here in the same muddled being?
Why am I not the others?
When i shall be basking in the sunshine
of my true self?
When I will stop stampeding
like horses through the fog of time?'
My life is somber
like those blues of Picas
so
so
I will treat you
to the most beautiful
of my suicides
I already hear
the staccato laughter
of Rimbaud at dusk
and Giorgione
playing the luth
to a Venetian maiden
and my father a sudden barfly
singing guarachas
to a jiggy Silvia Plath...
May I have a drumroll
while entering
in Hell?
Dusting off the shrine of a goddess
I forgot her name.
She blessed me once
in light blue robe, golden nimbus
and myrtle blooms
when I was an outcast
in an outcast country
(I forgot its name too)
*
A woman in the nude dances
on top of a beached whale in summer,
massive whale as the full moon
on the horizon. A sitar is playing
some kind of monsoon ballad
before a bonfire and silent gannets.
It's eventide. The full moon in yellow dress
dances with the naked woman.
*
I come across a top hat
in the middle of the street
dancing with a stray cat
in black fur and yellow feet.
The top hat hops me a scowl,
the cat spins me around a smile,
and the moon waxing awhile
in the golden eye of an owl.
The stray cat nimbly runs away
when some foxes bark to the top
hat now flying up on his way
to the hand of a whistling cop.
*
Under an opaline sky
a wolf not famished
but philosophical
strolls along the beach.
Likewise an odd man
in golden raincoat
and black beret.
He's the poet of the village
and never speaks
except to the pebbles,
the rainbows
and the wandering wolf.
*
In fine fettle the old lion
Still holds up the sun
with his mane at dawn.
What saves me of topping myself today:
my cat doing a handstand by the window,
Dalida singing Bambino at dawn,
the last spoor of kiss you left on my stubble,
the beauty of contrails streaming along the blue sky,
the smell of horse manure in the streets,
the fulsome warbles of a thrush in the morning,
the siren-cry of ambulances that carry not my corpse,
the rain-scented beams of the sun,
that William Carlos Williams' line:
the night passes, and never passes,
the loud laughing of mum in 1978
while sawing at her Singer,
the last smile you blew like a feather
into the air before waving a fond adieu,
the last spoor of kiss
you left on my dirty stubble...
Love passes and never passes.
