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?
