Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, UNFINISHED EXILE, by FABIO DOPLICHER


Poetry Explorer

Classic and Contemporary Poetry

UNFINISHED EXILE, by                    
First Line: You're a teeming truce today, my ladybug, red elytra


You're a teeming truce today, my ladybug, red elytra
for cheeks, seven black dots the stars
of a lost wager. In hundreds now they lower
the daily broom like a docked tail, men walking
in their own spit. In Rome's netherworld, cathedral of filth
that builds little altars at the crossroads, the old madman
black against the sun preaches with a sheet in hand,
slavering. You fight, imagination, crumble like the plaster
round the windows that torch this brothel's sun. It's a holiday,
so much a holiday, the dirty wrinkles of good living between the folds
unravel in shop windows. An intermission, ladybug, feed yourself,
let's lay down our souls here: we'll let ourselves be covered by the creeping
vines of sorry condominiums, which hide the diseases of the cement.

This mediocre need not to have been born, my dear, a shortcut,
footpath through scrap metal in the sun, stowed there by the wrecker:
dead cars and city funerals seem like so many abandoned puppies.
Accept it, life is right here, with its layer of cardboard, upright
and waiting. The grasses and algae, the forests of pine and
the large animals grazing in my childhood dreams
have become petroleum. A cowardly surrender, in the shadow of old districts
that drive out the poor the way the creator expelled the sin
from his own edifice; and with the grotesque burden of household odds and ends
amassed down through the generations, families descend
the decrepit stairs, rediscovering them one by one all the way to the threshold.

From stratum to stratum compressed to the curves of the mould,
we shall, my soul, become cardboard, a depot a waits us,
where we may pass our time. Consumed by a secret illness the great pine
at Villa Pamphili turns yellow, rank, while hopes, my ladybug,
burn black smoke in a conclave of butchers who cut the tape
at this cycle's finish-line. For me it began with the sea
and with a wooden tub that made the rainbow in a scent of soda.
We disintegrate together with the images of this headlong season,
from film to film, light blue shadow on the snow forbodes
a great landslide. Suspended piecemeal, the fragments the water-worm
left in the puddle multiply wildly. Floating above a graveyard
of empty conches, my father's hair appears, bright with silver
in a shell of mother-of-pearl, his eyes steady and wary
when he returned in war-time one Christmas with a fir-tree in his hand.
Small lamps scattered among pine-needles, cancer, we live inside a great tumor.

Like the whitethorns of Montebello, today blocked by buildings,
I have had my windy season, love in a family is like
white buds tightly huddled together, but it was not the last storm,
my dreams on the sea, which surrendered the briny foam to the wind
and the American sailors like glassy greenhorns to the alleys of the port.
I have left, ladybug, on an unfinished exile, plastic roses
pollinating spiderwebs over a tomb, the ashes of la Risiera,
like the beards of patriarchs, pursue oblivion in soft waves,
exorbitant promise, on magic carpets that the merchants of Corfu
trafficked in streetshops, darting flashing eyes amid the antiques.

At this hour on the outskirts crappers are emptied by young prisoners
of the obscure snake, buckets for water, buckets for excrements;
in the great clinic of the world, eyes of quartz the prison-camp doctors
test new crystals. Conscience a wet fuse
intermittently shoots sparks at the recurrent flames. We repeat
the cycle, spread out in a ring, a chain of tenderness
for horses with no luck in riding: at the Sisto bridge red
veils of air grow stagnant, like the foul breath of artesian wells
rotten on the water's surface, through ancient galleys
where Jews, pilgrims of the stake, recited songs of love
and Sephardic laments. Let us repent, ladybug, the night emerges
slimy from the mud, surrenders to the light, twig after twig amid the filthy
shrubs on the banks. We shall not rediscover time
suspended in your eyes, as they whimsically follow an airplane
spraying foul odors on the fated universe of fabricated lots.

As the drunken puppetmaster shows passers-by
his beard and navel, and puppets scattered in astonished
acts of dragons and prophets, and the man's gums make bubbles
little bubbles as he bites wax-paper, so this dawn has compromised us
in its dusty side-scenes, soaked us with disgust and pity
as we hold a coin in hand, among the walk-ons jumbling at the center
in the disfiguring rite of morning. This Roman she-wolf, ladybug,
has the eyes of the insane and of watchmen: she sees the millstones on our malleoli
soiled with tar and the marks of the woodworm that meshes nightly
with the breath of my sleep, and with the frozen stillness of a creature in a cage
she knits, like my soul itself, her own blanket of fog.


Used by permission of Story Line Press.




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