to Maria Vittoria



I did not know the gentleness
you spoke about, a language to me mysterious,
I did not know respect, tolerance,
the gymnastics of good manners.
            You, obstinately, treated
my hysteria with ironical assents and retaliatory
silences. In the Cies islands I demonstrated,
sitting on a rock by the sea, that love
– by a logical circle, sum
of syllogisms ground like Spinozian
lenses – is impossible, something absurd.

You defended yourself well, with mockery and spells,
citing passages from Ovid, baptizing
a bush – “this is pittosporum
bears white, sweet-smelling flowers, and this
is heather that stings but doesn’t smell sweet” –
the finger pointed to the hole in my shoe
“and this – you added – is the style
of the refugee, tatteresque
and stubborn,” you also spelled out
the names of Greek gods as with a child
one insinuates a lullaby into its crying,
a gag of sleep, and drowsy
with the lyrical bites, I imitated for you
– celebrating the mud of the world –
Céline the African, dying
and diarrheal, carried on stretchers, the laughter
you calmed, drawing dandelion flowers
on notebooks. The seeds I dispersed
against the light, in the fiery air
and with my cruel fingernail I sheared
the bridges of spider webs suspended
among broom bushes and dry walls.

            “The calm is a lie:
the parasites, the blasts of salt, the acids
of  man corrode the coast in every fiber,
what survives convulsively is the bottle
of plastic in the dust and stone
strong with an accumulated death
that the tenacious activity of the living
does not affect.” I dusted
a cold rage: the photo
of a sixteen-year-old Andinian miner
with gravel in his gums,
I kept in custody a memory not mine,
sacred, horrible, the icon of the bodies
crawling in the torrid darkness
where people fish for copper.

I did not know the use and context of words
that for you were ostensible things:
“politeness” and “respect,” for me fairy-tales
empty air. I was never serene,
disarmed, in the siege
of forebodings and current fantasies:
the torturer at work, meticulous in burning,
in beating the soles of the feet,
in squeezing nipples till madness came.

I have known the violent joy
of the crested screaming in mics
diving bare-chested from the stage
on the herd packed and restless.
I have loved the plague of ruined walls,
the scars on the forehead, the excavations
where in rust-cooked barrels
a chemical water rocks
the head of a madman, deranged
by the flashes of amphetamine.
I listened, in rapture, beating
a chain on the sidewalk
to the point of hypnosis, in the occupied
factory on via Bernina.

I remember all the degrees of anxiety
savored as a fatal element,
the world cannot be rid of. I reconsider
all the logical fractures of fear, its violent
peaks, its flashing that rises
from every corner, like a commotion
of blades. And the effort to maneuver
discourses that have lost hours hence thread
and direction. I never believed in politeness,
in the taste of wine, in the smell
of grass. But in the crushed geometries
of solitary prayers and meditations,
in exorcisms that call
the thoughts of the condemned, the buried
alive. It has been a good wrong turn.
The truce is no less real than the war.
This I have understood. I have educated myself anew
to weigh everything and with increasingly precise
scales. And I also perceive a needle
of rosemary, now, on the palm of my hand.
It is a detail that becomes central in the picture.
And I will be polite to the rosemary too
I water it and observe it under
different lights, I have given it liquid
manure, I have tied a cracked pot
with a clothes-string.
And torture exists. And rosemary flowers exist.