Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, ASYMMETRY OF THE UNIVERSE, by FABIO DOPLICHER


Poetry Explorer

Classic and Contemporary Poetry

ASYMMETRY OF THE UNIVERSE, by                    
First Line: In a thousandth of a second / the world was already made


In a thousandth of a second
the world was already made.
in matter's imbalance, the void
was born within the unknown lawgiver.
Vessel of time spent, I've loved
the necessity of verse, mirror of energy.
You're not just word, my word.

Today he who lies with you, poetry,
walks an odd tightrope of desire.
It's seriousness I require, so that in the icy space
untainted light may reach me with its long parabola.
We are the useless, necessary mirror,
ossuary-bound after alchemies of song.
But seek for now the boundary of the thinkable and soar.

Twisting a curl between ring-finger and pinky,
you ask me where we're going. We're like verses,
free, dispersed in buckets abrim with water.
I don't want to see my reflection, a day's gnawing
does not satisfy our clawing thirst, now grown calm.
Happiness of thinking without goal, balm
of music far away, anticrystals.

A thief in yellow gloves, that's the poet, in the hotels
of the cite bergere, forced into the rituals, the programes,
the social duties, the bureaucratic
forms. A different creation, shouts
the imagination, masturbating,
aged radical, as in vain
two councilmen apply the chains.

As in the passage from one plane to another
a beam of light is broken, so poetry now seeks
the briefest intervals. The pulsation
has distant cycles; verse-builders
orient their radar in the bog of the ordinary.
In marshland, there's no choice: one must be
God or a frog-hunter.

A sense of the end reigns over
all our senses. It names words,
hides between thought and body, rocks
them both. With empty pockets, altar boys
of the ineffable whisper all in solitude
within the monastery walls. Another wind, cosmic
and distant, makes trepidation useless and laughable.

To each his own downfall, Orpheus on the scales
weighs the chances of the false logicians
and the sham initiates to survive one another:
if you're not prepared to die
do not attempt the song. The ozone's
ragged veil leaves us inescapably exposed
to an alteration in the cycle.

Art of thought you toil hard
inside this intermediary age. At the peak
of landslide, matter engulfs and you see no more.
Slowly you subside, begin the game again:
there's a breath of sea in this repeated seeking.
Within the page's frame the verses
idle and begin to dream.

Scattered in ice, where the links
of matter's chain radiate more broadly,
our thoughts tune into solitude.
There is no correspondence, not even with the source,
and we, the embittered gamblers,
we bet all our chips on balance
though true song needs divine disharmony.

White does not exist and yet, creatures of the page,
we search beyond the margins -- the outskirts of poetry,
occult visitress, sacred prostitute.
If that passion is of no help to you
seek no song or complaint.
The spell of two persons in love,
my friend, lies beyond the coupling.

Into its matrix the old matter flows back,
condenses. The goal's intense attraction
leads everything back to this outermost space.
Sated with bodies, ice-cold, the demon
of thought draws near. He offers
a black margin of incompleteness;
but freedom does not attract: form is missing.

As when on a clear night
the sky reveals the imagination's openings
and the simulation of the void takes us back
to that net, so poetry's concern has now
become the loving contemplation
of the margins of the hopeless, of verses
thought, years wasted in a ring.

Alchemists of beauty with no touchstone,
let us join hands, my girl, before Hadrian's
nocturnal Canopus. Imitation doesn't count:
from the pool of mercury we must
raise up a new homunculus.
And so along the way shall we test the word
as we join hands toward the tower of Chia.


Used by permission of Story Line Press.




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