Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, CUNCTA SEMPER, by RODOLFO DI BIASIO


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

CUNCTA SEMPER, by                    
First Line: The warm ashes of the word


I

The warm ashes of the word
still come unravelled
from a fibrillation of the blood
a few sparks weave the grey thread
the hand follows
a flash and nothing more

Cuncta semper: of course...
but who knows where they settle
amidst immovable oaks
across a still sky more still
than time's bending
time blue to the point of agony
and bent where the crest
confuses wind and aromas
and our tiny caravans do not arrive
overcome as they are by the desert
of habit

Inside...cuncta semper...of course...
a tangle, the thickest
indissoluble clot of words-events
warm ash grey ash
where the act no longer intervenes
where it would be enough to believe
we'd been alive and indispensible
for a handful of days

II

One among the endless dusty distances
one finally filled
opens out in this customary entrance of spring
if the eye comes to aid
and follows one by one the broomflowers
as they become a sea
that unearths and restitches
the yellow swaying of the mountain

The distance searches out of habit
always the same grey habit
for its place -- prospect, passage --
and for its time

the peremptory consonance
the same that demands as its own
the broom in springtime
when the wind seconds the grass's murmur
under the feet

The pool of light annuls
vast flash with no frayed edge
oh at that point
the light seems eternal and cuts short, annuls
the winding paths, the narrow paths
that meet in an underbrush of memories,
presents again the miracle of repetition

III

Another fog, the bright one of uncertain mornings
in May across the hill
the one the sun later takes apart
olive by olive
the one that exhumes the home's breath
another fog has levelled sudden eddies
and filled them with its grey exhaling
and the irremovable fog
of night this time
where words come out as echoes
ramifications
tenacious, persistent essences

Where faces in a throng toil breathless
from their deserted regions
the faces' marble
they, they who coldly ask
for permission
and reconfirm
time's particle
at once consumed along much-travelled roads
now crumbling roads
that do not retain
a single sign of their persistence.


Used by permission of Story Line Press.




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