A travel in Italy I parte (POESIA) ~ di Jerry Mirskin - TeclaXXI

 

POESIA

 

Jerry Mirskin

 

A travel in Italy– Parte Prima

Fiesole 

Fiesole

I like the way they live forever in Italy.
I like the way they take the time to do it.
How they put their whole lives into it.
The wine will tell you this.
The way it stands on the table.
So lonely, dark and lonely.
I like the way they live forever in Italy.
Like each day they put a penny in.
A penny for art. One for work.
They know it will take a whole life to pay off.
All this art. All this beauty.
In Fiesole, outside of Florence
I saw two men walking the hills.
When they passed a small faded shrine
their walk faded. They gave a few pennies.
A handful of lira.
They were on one side of a hill
walking a small path to their homes.
On the other side was the city, and the duomo.
You can see it ten miles away
like a great tired heart sleeping soundly
in the smoke of sunlight.
Asleep and snug in the valley by the Arno.
Which side would I prefer?
From here we could see that the sun
was going down on one knee.
The grooves of the city were growing taller
like a taller garden.
Shadows were growing clever in the alleys.
Still, the sun was working hard as always.
Conspiring with the church and the city on one side
and the vine on the other.
I like the way they live forever in Italy.

 

Bell Tower

To the young Italian men of Florence
it's all Mamma and the bell tower.

The heart is out of its cage,
flying up the six hundred steps.
Hands remember well how the walls lean.
how a body bends through the soft inner channel,
or how this ascent might be a second birth.

If only Florence weren't so beautiful.
One can get so drunk on art,
one can reek of history.
But today there is no other place.
It's the light at the end of the tunnel.
The calm wind that ferries you to the top
where the city opens like a jewel in God's hand.
If you believe or not, it doesn't matter.
Here you are a beginner.
Though you know more here than anywhere else.
The beauty of handling bread.
The drama of speaking to another.
The art of crawling the sidewalk on your knees.
The fundamental grace of gazing at other human beings
the way beauty deserves to be gazed at.
Not only with taking, but with letting.

Looking down from the tower,
the red clay roofs were napping in the sun.
The whole city was smiling, playing its part.
But where there is too much heaven and not enough earth,
too much air and too little stone, the heart weeps for the street.
To walk, and walk into a theater of its own,
among its own, the body of men, and the body of women.
To nominate the other and have the other nominate you.

From the tower I could see the hills
and the small roads that divine the countryside.
You can see it all from up there.

Mamma and the bell tower.

No wonder the monks
lived on the hills outside of town
carrying their water, saying their prayers
with the city in the distance.

 

 

Siena

It's the Palio.
They're taking their horses to church.
Youths sing in the street
in a kind of gang warfare.
They wear the colors of their neighborhood.
Now one group grows louder
backing up, rearing their heads in song.
The other, a troupe in yellow and purple
won't be bettered by volume.
Their song is their song.

A few hundred years ago
the Florentines catapulted donkeys
over the high walls of Siena
to start a plague. I wasn't there
but here, now, sipping cappuccino
staring at brothers and sisters
singing at the top of their lungs.

Here, where instead of using them
for ammunition, they walk their horses
down the aisle to be blessed for a race
that will decide whose neighborhood is best.

It's such an unusual and beautiful sight.
The animals are well behaved and respectful.
Down to the sullenness of their manes
and further, down to their muscular and bare beauty--
they seem to belong here by the altar.
They fit right in with the holiness
and the terror.

They are as quiet as morning.

 

Italy

 

There we were in Florence and Venice

prancing like immortals in the open brothels

of the streets.

In the museums and mansions, the palaces

and academies of art.

My bride and I giving a few pennies

to the cobbled cities of spire and dome,

the riffs of fashion, the inspirations of piety.

A few pennies, a handful of lira.

A purse or two.

 

But that was all,

for having just stepped into our new life together

we were called to beginnings—

more like the simple rock and water

of the small towns along the shore.

One, I remember, where a woman

unselfconsciously removed the soft clutter

of her clothes, and stepped into the sea.

Avoiding herself being turned to stone

for feeling the infinitesimal thrust of existence.

And the sea took a step forward, and a step back.

The slow foot of the sea.

 

And I took a stone for life simple and smooth.

For a day the way they make them in Italy.

 

The way Italy says, this is what bread is.

And the wine stands on the table upright and vigilant,

and the sun lights the oil like a golden fuse.

 

Isn't that what day wants to be in every precinct?

In the forge of every moment?

These unsculpted consolations.

These shimmerings.

 

Later I would stow my embers in my checked bags

and not declare anything.

Removing stones from history should be a crime.

They have their pure still lives.

But it is understandable. 

Such things are for those who need an exchange,

for each thing, each instance bearing

what needs to be known.

 

My traveling companion—with honeymoon eyes—

took pictures of the local felines.

They were her medallions, meowing of the present,

the hungry life.

Especially that black wretch

who followed me down to the pier, where I went

to take an early swim, lowering myself into the dark

Mediterranean morning.

 

I remember how those two stood by

above the rocks as I swam before the events of day

would break the stillness of the sea.

Going now that I had everything,

to give myself to something larger.

 

Can one go further than the beauty of things?

Past green morning?  Beyond blue day?

And what would be the exchange?

 

There were a few boats drifting in the water

in which I drifted.

There is so much poise in a boat.

    So much charity in clear water.

JERRY MIRSKIN 

BIONOTA 

Jerry Mirskin was born in the Bronx, New York, and has lived in California, Wisconsin and Maine. He has worked as a herdsman on a dairy farm, as a carpenter, and as a New York State Poet-in-the-Schools. He is a Professor Emeritus at Ithaca College and taught select classes at Cornell University. His poetry has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies, and he has presented his work and given workshops at universities, colleges, public libraries, art centers, and on public television and radio. He won the Arts & Letters Prime Poetry Prize for a selection of poetry.  His manuscript, Picture a Gate Hanging Open and Let that Gate be the Sun, was the winner of the Mammoth Books Prize for Poetry, a national poetry competition. As a result of that prize, Jerry’s first and subsequent books were published by Mammoth Books.