sonnenbrücke & other fragments (poetry)

Road on the seashore, 1895
Giovanni Fattori

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João-Maria

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Version for mobile reading:

602 - (sonnenbrücke)

(1)
He beckoned the sheep with his
sweetest hand. He climbed the oak,
restored the nest
of a solemn little thing. 

(2)
His pulse had the umbra of a mountain.
His wounds produced in him no pain. 
At dawn he hauled the body of his father,
his world spun in the axis of his heart.

(3)
He blamed the grass for the coming of the frost. 
His tears were beetles in a drowned world.
The hours were lost. The hours were lost.
The hours were frost in his grassy world.

(4)
Slowly, all of his skin was a blind skin. 
He dressed himself like a mossy boulder.
The sheep environed him, his sweetness.
The birds were disfigured, his sulk. 

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579 - ()

Ōdī et amō, I grabble the chains. Yesterday
slipped from me, I gnaw. I belong. I hug
the expressions of other. Other too 
am I. My nephew is afraid
of the moon. I too, am other,
and constitute a moonlike thing
and gleam and disappear
in the supreme violence
of my sameness. I will hug you
forever, tiny being, so that you too
can disappear. 

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606 - () 

To you, Empedocles, woe was being orphaned
by birth. The warm plumage of nature rejected
the birthed one. Nature affiliated the inert things.

The spacial sounds of veins, oh, the black
     air and black spume of a black sea. Day,
 a hungry apparatus and a tree with
  many mouths. Seaside, a magnificent symphony
wets the bodies of flowers. I listen, I listen,
how am I the orphan, Empedocles?

Its bones gong and daylight shivers, the children
will never know the frailty of their makers, and
each footstep storms in a giant collapse. The sand
ripens like a corpse. I watch, I watch,
how are we the orphaned ones, Empedocles? 

Why do we seek a night
that doesn’t seek us?