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Three Poems by Davide Trame
Prodigal Sun
It’s back, the fiery stripe on your table,
it’s higher now, out early above the opposite roof,
it gives your shoulders, through the window pane,
a foretaste of the luminous time to come.
Despite the promise of a clawing heat
you welcome it, without reserve.
You silently praise the unframed radiant countenance
and can’t feel close
to the Hindu monks who sit cross-legged
in a row on the beach, the reds and yellows
of their vests and faces full bright
in the broad bountiful light,
while they finger the coral beads in front of the sea
whispering their mantras not to be reborn
and trickles of sand stream away in the wind.
No, you can’t understand them at all,
your heart is “fastened to a dying animal”, no doubt,
but you feel healthy with desire
sitting at your warm illuminated table,
your arms settled on the smooth sunlit cherry-wood lines,
on time’s renewed, homecoming complexion.
In the Fog
Evening already, the lagoon is still and cold,
we are swaddled together in the smooth tightness,
we share it with the pulsing puffs of our breaths.
The pressing closeness of the world lingering unseen
binds us together on the deck.
The radar rotates, hovering and alert,
a soldier’s gaze ready to face an ambush.
But there’s not much anxiety, not much fear,
it’s as if we were born here, getting accustomed
to chatter with the dull vast shadows,
the other bank being not very far
with its long belt of stones like marbles,
its humming bustle and children’s shouts.
When there always seems to be one more stretch to go,
in thick emptiness, on the dark oily water-skin,
we sense we can almost touch the voices on the bank,
they are ours as our own breath and heart,
what happens is just that we are blind
to what most lasts and weaves us onward,
while we wait for our meaning.
Rehearsal
After lunch
when the conversation ends
the last sparse words
are absorbed
in the ticking of the clock,
the cat’s nails rattling on the railing,
the sky blooming in the silence.
All is fulfilled,
present and gone.
You rehearse for the blue
start of the unknown.
Davide Trame is an Italian teacher of English living in Venice. His poems have appeared since 1999 in The Shop, International Poetry Review, Stand, Dream Catcher, Orbis, Meridian Anthology, Diner, and other magazines.
Copyright © 2005 Davide Trame
This page published in January 2005
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