Love at its start and at its finish is not
a sentiment

————–but in your arrival a restless
fury, eye of cyclones, the dream
of a fossilized gaze
smashed under amber
arrangement of stars
in the air and on your face—

each step a last judgment.

Sentiments change, but not the struggle
between the life that seeks out life
and the life that seeks out death.

Love, hold me tightly, can you feel it?

muted, howling in the streets of Italy
and in what Italy’s becoming
among blood’s scintillas and rude
waiters
something that knows not your name, and

like a killer, no gaze nor yesterdays
grazes and poisons all the day’s names.

But, love, at the start and at the finish,
call out to the wind, invent new paths of return
don’t leave these plazas deprived of you

hands on cribs, cars
aligned against the sun
and poems and women, these crazy women

 

Translated from the Italian by Gregory M. Pell