WHEN TIME WAS SLOW
Memory or mirage,
the whispers of May leaves
and thick grass in which you got lost,
stalks erasing any trace of a path,
your horse stuck in a ditch, legs trapped
in its narrowness, a black furrow,
and you waiting while she galloped away
looking for help, maybe you were even hearing
her horse’s hoof-taps while she jumped
over hedges and pools, or maybe it was just
the mayflies clustering around the horse’s eyes
while he squatted in his knotted posture,
saddle-bags in the mud on his sides
in the full cupped silence of sky like the grasp
of a flower in the heat, you were
anxious in the wait, in that mute green,
till the horizon offered a silhouette,
an old man with a stick and a cardigan
walking quietly,
when he reached you he seemed to restart
a talk he had interrupted by chance,
he slowly said gazing at the horse:
“ This one? Let’s see.” He stood on the
edge of the ditch
and with the stick’s handle he calmly hooked
bridles and bit
and lifted up, and the horse in a flash
was on his feet
in an explosion of splattering mud,
you felt at once like the breath of all the fields,
vastly glad
and didn’t mount the horse but took the bridles
and walked in the idle
lush grass, in the fields’
open labyrinths, their large instants,
you thanked the man then and are
still thanking him now, still walking with him
in your mind’s eye slowly to a house
the horizon has still to reveal,
in waving hedges and a wind that heals
and brings you back to a more still time,
to a summer evening in your countryside
where you sat as a child on your farmyard wall
and watched your great-uncle cut wood
sitting on a log, settled in the air’s stare,
short axe chopping, a full supple sound
echoing like glances in the ground,
in the lasting dusk your eyes drank,
in the land’s arms.
ON THE PERMANENCE OF STONES
Heated by the summer sun
they are a welcoming hand
receiving your winter pale limbs
in their huge palms.
The new causeway is larger
and longer, it extends farther
into the sea horizon, reds and ochre
on the tip are having their wide
dialogue with water.
Feet pass from time to time, taste
the small asperities
of each surface, before letting
the body lie down on a towel
or slide like a slow lizard
among seaweeds and plunge in.
I am standing on this mute heart now
before my swim, I am crouching
for balance before my little jump,
I am waiting as if taken in
by eyes beyond eyes under the sun
as if I knew it would be the best way
to be unmade.
As if I knew their mute stay
would finally give me a place,
it’s maybe my naked feet,
soles full and flat, adhering
while I scan the horizon
with no waves anywhere, in the still summer,
just a gaze for your gaze, the quiet
bare grip.
An arched stone has helped me
take the plunge, the arches of my feet
balancing on it.
On the safe firmness.
Swimming, I think of the graves
I haven’t visited for a long time,
months, a year maybe, it always
seems a long time.
Or a time beyond.
We think they are waiting there
for our visit, for us to change the flowers,
“waiting,we say, giving time
a kind of breath, an earth face
covering the unknown,
the inertness in the stone.
Helping you come down
from the granite block
on the path crossing the river bed
I was afraid you had scraped your back
on the scaly, rough texture,
the moss catching scales of light
piercing the undergrowth.
You said it had been all right, no scratch,
and we looked back at the gap
from stone to gravel
that would stay behind us
before finding us again- who knows?-
in skin or bark, or in that rustling often
confused with chatter
over rooted rock bodies
welcoming all fluttering
like rhinos or hippos do, on their backs,
sky sailing on their stoniness.
Davide Trame is an Italian teacher of English.
He has been writing exclusively in English since 1993. His poems have appeared in magazines since 1999. His poetry collection,
Re-emerging, was published by Gatto Publishing in 2006.
