First fancy

“To follow , on a summer’s afternoon, a chain of mountains to the horizon or a branch that casts its shadow upon someone resting beneath – that means breathing the ‘aura’ of those mountains, or of that branch.”
Abandoned at the edge of a sheep track
The skin of a restless snake
Thin and delicate as India paper
Ripples with regal ‘nonchalance’,
As if it were blown away from the world
And breathed in mistakenly by distant lips…..
I too, like a silver snake
Lost in the urban miasma
Have my scaly cast-off skin.
You are not here, Oh Sibilla,
But who, if not you, with delicate sighs
Is not furtively taking it off me?
Who, if not you, converts my obsolete existence
Into a leap made from an “inflated” life?
Wherever you look , it is impossible
To see coasts void of breath
Not eased by that
for which breathing itself may breathe.
Like gasping breasts
The hundred thousand profiles of the cliffs
Go up and down again in the exhausting alternation
Of stolen signs and dreamy immensity.
I really do not believe my eyes.
Doesn’t every broken line gain strength in spring water carriers?
Doesn’t it rustle like the clothing of maidens hurrying to Eleusis?
A faint frond smokes.
Time itself stretches forward into the air
Like a featherless chick in the stubble.
I follow the ‘li’.
I pour myself into the friction that with the ether creates
The maple leaf in autumn.
I inhale the quivering of the Form
Entering limbo ( where “limbo”
Is the separate part, dislocated and exposed to the winds
 Like a flower’s sepals...)
Oh Cézanne!
If only I had your gift of seeing the peaks
Enfolding them in your very flesh
And of proving the réglement sans règle
by which valleys and rises share
the moist memory of morning dews,
then I would go to the roots of your clever secret
that makes every appearance fade and recede
towards the fan of Castelmanardo.
Up there, among the mother-of-pearl stretches in the snowy gorges,
The afternoon brush
Paints you on the canvas of the pastures.
Delightful and sonorous creases
Stretch in front of you
Like lazy inert animals....
And a mysterious languor
Like that of a “wandering sleepwalker”
Pours from ridge to ridge
Until from the union between the feathery cirrus
And the rustling of the vast place
A blue-white vision of the rhythm
That springs over all perspectives appears.
Glimmers and shadows, rarefactions and ‘frissons’
Dawn dehiscences and sensations
That, fluctuating with the senses,
Touch the idle cushion
Scarcely beneath the covering of the countryside...
Someone bends the dawn half moon towards my brow...
Instead of me “putting on airs”
It is the changing breath of that fan that does so
Like a veil revealing a caesium face
That can smile even
At its own smile.
You laugh even at me, dear friend!
But believe me, my oblique obsession, my ‘tender land’,
My phoenix that dances with floccules and filaments
On the peaks of the plateaux:
No other land is so sweet,
No other land so persuasive.
Aladdin’s lamp for the saddest childhoods,
Cradle of stories, of joy, of games,
The mountains I saw were dark,
Terrifying and severe
As the mathematics of Lautréamont,
But you – You,
Goddess of blessed solitude,
Young Parca who distils
 Imperceptible nectar with witchcraft
Oh you, great loving plateau, overflowing with sweetness,
Like a vase of perfume from Arabia,
You win the best Song of Songs
With the liqueur of your silence.
Your sun is like a September fig
Hanging from a blue sky,
Your moon is a piece of pomegranate,
Your snow is whisked milk
Your stars are pieces of candied light.
Your crouched loins
Elude me, disillusioning me
With the perfume that blossoms
From the bare possible perceptions.
In your eyes you have the decoration
That the wave writes on the fine sand,
And as breasts disgorge milk
So your rounded outposts “express” the sea.
Regina viarum, mistress of folds,
You have made a way out of the depths of the seas.
You transformed Pontes, god of the waves,
Into Poros of the thousand roads.
The underwater flux became your roads,
Your walks songs
That unfold like currents
With a single aimless destination:
To go and empty into other currents,
Joking and phrasing
With a thousand witty deviations
Among the pleasant slopes of the Pianile.
You are not everything
( la Sibylle n’est pas toute ).
The walled “ mountain walk “ of Efre
Obstinately keeps your entirety from me.
I see only your skis
That en grand ‘alegransa
Open up the slopes to melismas of iconic grace
And to the tinkling glows
That glide down the ice steps in the night.
I see only your hands
That enchant the madness of the sea
Making it transparent in the sky
And straighten the rudder of the winds
Opening up holes in the precipices and windows in the green
Digging woodworm passages to spaces beyond.
Riddled with your zephyrs
That get into holes in the steepest slopes
And induce an ironic suspicion
In my vast knowledge,
I am by now a porta fenestella
A pore in the skin, an entrance,
An isthmus for fine ships.
Tooth of a saw in fade-out
Broken-off and wedge-like
Down to the bone,
Reduced to bindu, a dot, a drop,
A germ, a seed, sperm and primordial clot,
I am pushed to visiting the unique places
The green allées between instinct and style ,
Where your aura and your stoles of cloud
Join the sensitive loads
To the super-sensitive north-wind harps
That flutter on high , blue-green and elusive.
“It is as if they were here – and as if they weren’t,
both high and low” …
for a moment I am lost ….
Ki ki li Chib Chib Ki ki li …
But even though the thread of experience is lost
Tiny stones full of meaning burst through
Among the rare thistle tufts.
The gap is side-stepped
And they come backwards to meet me halfway
Almost dreaming, on tiptoe:
The soft sublime
Of the Colle delle Bassete ;
The ferns of Rio Sacro
Where groups of mute instruments
Laugh hidden amongst the beeches;
The Costa della Pintura bathed in soft moonlight
By a moon that waxes and wanes gently
Like a baby breathing in the womb;
The bits of straw, the confetti, the frills of effervescence
Of the Falls of Acquasanta
With their dancing photons
Evaporated from the “ black hole” of the canyon
In a descant of soft subdued pipes
That translate the sparkling start of every image
Into sparks from a thyrsus staff.
Flares hung on a parachute.
Twirls of a rocket with climax after climax.
“This is your image, that on the outside bows me down,
and inside seems to expand, and which broadens me too.”
 
Second fancy
It has happened.
After years of waiting unaware
Sitting on the same trunk
In front of the same wall,
At last,
Between mid-day and midnight,
It happened.
A rumble of thunder.
Space and time ripped apart
As if the quiver of bronze
Had spread with a muffled thud
Beyond the wall of my brow…
The vase has burst.
Now it is beyond the wall.
I am in the world
Like a world within the world.
I am suspended
From the same suspension.
The universe opens up on all sides.
The bastions hover like wings:
Wings of lace, lattice wings,
Fringed wings, coloured and stencilled,
Prismatic wings, fluted
And almost completely transparent ….
O great arch-magician of the snows
Who raises heavy eyelids of mist
Like one who sleeps and has to awaken!
I only barely understand what I am doing.
I only barely remember what I say.
A dusty past
Has broken my vertebrae
And thrust the arrows from its quiver
Into my kidneys.
Like an angry worm
I come up out of the earthy mud,
My limbs lethargic, hazy and greasy
And then – from the pre-dawn splendours
From the emerald scarabs,
From the trembling columns of happy trunks –
You descend with your symphonial waters
Over the burning of the wounds,
You remove the ancient nails of words
With tweezers of breeze
And on my body racked by deceit you release the phials of elixir …
No more stiffness in my neck, my shoulders, my back,
My hands, my knees, my ankles.
My blood flows well, my skis too.
My body is flexible, contractile, sparkling with lymph.
The slight humming that the snow makes
When it melts in the fields,
Staging a set of suspens
That elevates reality,
Makes my tendons and flesh
Like those in a resurrection by Luca Signorelli.
Et levia moventur sursum ….
Like a rogue in felt shoes
I pass with a whisper among the hills with frothy crests
I pass with a whisper among the balls of lambs wool
I pass with a whisper among the fizzy variety of events
Offering the sunset seven full sails.
And now, in mad torsion,
You open your mouth to me, You / Me!
I would have no tongue without your palate.
You would have no eyelashes without my eyeball:
It is as if you looked at the picture of yourself
Inside my pupil ….
Your magnetic foliage caresses itself in me
As I lose myself in your dense slopes,
In your ship-shaped crests, in your prows setting sail
On unpredictable adventures
Between continents of tenderness.
And while I blow on you scattering over your celestial expanses
Mists changing like those caused by breath on a mirror,
You breathe on me, strewing my secret gathering of fancies
In flashes of flying blades
Like those of fish darting among coral madrepores.
Separating ourselves, we cling together in dove kisses.
Labris colombatur. ( Is it purely coincidence that you are called Venusberg? )
It is not I who kiss you, nor you who kiss me,
But we are both crossed
By the anonymous form of the kiss
As lotus flowers opening their petals
Are drenched in the pleasure of sunlight.
It is the absent-minded pulsation
Of gathering/leaving and of separation /clinging
Which bathes our minds
With the same fresh and elfin humour
That circulates among the branches of the sorb tree.
But kissing is like speaking mouth to mouth
Half-phrases, half-words
( “ and my tongue a day at a time is light”…)
mutterings from unsteady margins
timid parodies of a clandestine verb
that announces beauty greater
than that of the full moons in summer.
Pft! No more than a moment
And the afterlife forbidden by Efre
Falls back slowly, drop by drop,
Through the twisting stills
The spiral alembics, the tortuous cucurbits
Of our co-birth with Eros.
Whoever confides in their own heart
Is a fool,
But he who confides in your perflatum
Will never be disappointed.
You will always convert the “restful” storms
Into musical mosaics of air.
You will always lubricate with puns
The lever of transcendency.
You will always inspire that vital force
That frees itself of the bonds
Breaks the underground shells, demolishes the wax partitions,
And lets germinate in the unfolding of the petals
The rose of catastrophe.
And it will always be the time of change.
In Pian Perduto or above Vallecanto
Horses with wavy tails
Rid themselves of excess hair
Rubbing their scars of rashness
Against trees and poles.
With magisterial agility
The pale stream of the flock
Winds among nettles and elder
Like wild woolly snakes.
Perfectly self-controlled,
The woods go to die on the meadows
Just as the sea does on the beach.
Their death does not last long.
From that arched silence
Cups of green pine cones are born anew
And the marvellous butterflies leave gifts at the doors of houses.
They are the sweet gifts of the evening.
The wind drops. The world has stopped.
The reaper who was mowing in the valley
Has sat down on the carpet of hay.
The archer who was taking aim
Has thrown away his bow.
The musician who was seeking a chord
Has abandoned his instrument.
Multum replete est anima nostra!
So full of arcane fragrances,
Completed gardens, half-open flowers,
And laughter and smells and pulsation and starless nights…
Lightness! Lightness! Lightness1
The time has come
To take our thoughts to graze
To loosen the grip of Sense
And to let the utmost silences talk
Between body and place
Between action that steps back and the radiant substance of the hills.
When the germinal breath is muffled
In fluent fine gold dust
And the mountain seems to be missing its base,
Then I become a SHADOW, light and exiled,
Bent forwards like an ancient Idea,
A shadow that has passed through ten thousand strata and synclines,
A silhouette that, even taking the wrong road,
- just like the bizarre old man
fallen into the pits and derided by the natives of Aix –
Glides away guided by instinct
Like a salmon that darts over there
In the arcane tangle of the forests,
In the golden river bed, among carnation and moss,
Thistle and raspberry,
Where the falcon quenches his eternal thirst.
So I disappear into the heavens.
And, to the men of the Sibillini Mountains
Who stay gazing at the clouds,
The partridges, settling themselves in a circle
For their imminent roosting reunion,
Seem to say:
“What are you looking at? He has ascended!”

Paolo Ramaccioni.
 

"S'increspa lo spazio/come un gran bacio, impazzitodi nascere per nessuno", da S. Mallarmè, Autres poemes, tr. ital. Milano 1966
 

"Quel giorno (dies illa), ma non dell'ira"
 

"...dell'ineffabile la geometria sottile", da M. Machado, Estilo, tr. ital. Milano 1985
 

"E se vedo quell'acqua detta "santa" penso che fosse nulla Mongibello o Etna, quando al cile la fiamma mette"
 

"Vedeasi l'ombra piena di Letizia nel folgòr chiaro che di lei uscia"
Dante, Paradiso, V, 107-108