Tristiu

Prologue

Poems fail

when love fails

Don't listen to what they tell you;

A poem needs love's warmth

to endure time's coldness.

A place I have invented

to go when I am deeply sad

sad right down to the unmelting ice inside me

the crystals of tears

or until regrets my little white panther cubs

start biting and their bites how they smart!

Tristiu I call the place I have invented

to go when I am deeply sad

a state continously intensified

since all the grand landscapes of the end

begin to smell stagnant water

and rotten fruit.

In Tristiu you arrive without a sigh

only with a slight pressure inside

recalling love standing hesitant

at the threshold of the house.

Here you'll find poets living in "sacra-cy"

loft ones, who with the shake of the head

signify: "no...no...it's a mistake"

or even: "what a pity, now it's too late",

while a beggar on the corner keeps mumbling:

"The good thing about desire

is that when it disappears

the value of its objects disappears as well."

Here are the failures of youth

have become silent public squares

the mutilated passions, dark parks

and the last pitiful love exchanges

underfed dogs wandering in the alleys.

Worse than old age

this place is inhabited by wasted youth.

In Tristiu I am constantly in tears

from the moment you showed me

the value of sorrow...

No, it is not the negative of fertility

but the positive of absence...

You said and your profile disturbed me

as if it were carved in the hardest of rocks,

your eyes made of sulphur

alarmed, alarmed me...

Let's weep, then, and let's call it joy

joy because we are still here, suffering.

At daybreak we will enter another harbour

like entering a new poem

and in the frost I will hold

the last line of an untold love story.

The voice, the height, the line of the neck,

they are all eternal repetitions of the insatiable fear.

Looking at you I discovered

the hinterland of feeling.

The most beautiful man in Tristiu

found a black butterfly dead, in his sheets.

He was naked and slightly sweating

he shone but not as much as it did

with all the light coming out of death.

The winged symbol of superficiality, the butterfly

motionless, dressed the colours of the night

was found lying there as if, immediately after an orgy,

death had got up and left.

Or as if it were resting before starting its difficult

journey from blackness to perfection.

The youngest woman in Tristiu is me

who looks and looks and can't believe

that so much dust has accumulated

on the path of joy.

I tell myself that there must be some mistake

and I never followed the road of Silk,

I never touched the hero of the poem on the chest.

His heart only I imagined standing

like a bank that we see and think

"How many things are locked in here, how many riches."

What you lose stays with you for ever

and Tristiu is a place that I have fabricated

there to be one with everything I have lost

when the unsufferable dusk comes

or the mute sunrise

and it is again as you were waiting for the school

bell to ring, the lesson to start again

yet another exercise on an onknown theme.

You look down, the school yard's cement

or pebbles, you brush away a few crums from your school uniform

and you enter the classroom;

you enter the monotony of tasteless time

the vagueness of existence

which, I know, a bit altered

one finds again toward the end.

Religion in Tristiu

is a Headless Meaning.

Her statue stands quietly

next to those of her sisters:

Virtue, the most beautiful and Wisdom

with the best proportions.

But Meaning is adored without a head

and when the one I would love if...

comes to worship her, he wears pink shirt

and is aroused

because everything means something to him,

it's opposite too.

Here love and death became one body

and the grass growing

in between the open legs of the lying statues

makes them resemble living souls

who grieve in the green and shipwreck

in foreign eyes and in love suffer.

In Tristiu love-death is worshipped

as a unique meaning, headless because without hope.

EXODUS

Leaving Tristiu behind

I realized that I had lost my sense of direction

towards something that would be a real smell

and real wrist with beautiful pulsating life.

I turned once round myself

and while I was heading for the boat

I found myself in front of a closed shop.

Behind the windowpane black from dust

a tragic jacket was standing: no one

would ever seek warmth in it, ever.

The sun had set

and the streets all together

were howling "impasse".

I left. In between my palms

as if a frozen bird's

last breath

I was protecting the last handshake.

END

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Tristiu