L'intellettuale da asporto

They live on the same staircase of the apartment building in a more or less middle-class neighborhood an enclave of southern dialects stacked up like vertebrae in the flesh of being in the world. They do not know each other, nor any of their neighbors: if there is fellowship amongst them it’s always on this side of sympathy of the hassle of saying hello it’s nature that links them to an unseen trickle of blood. Paper puppets that open up like identical sentences have gazes no less blank than their imaginations— the comparison is frivolous, they wouldn’t like it. On the first floor a forty-year-old man a Spanish mother a self-sufficient father who get his groceries and sometimes cries if he sees him drunk that son raised in the courtyard who went mad after mistaking a woman’s no for the sound of the trumpets on Judgment Day. It happens. The girl who echoes him on the second floor insults her mother she would like to disappe...

Capita a noi che parliamo della guerra in astratto: per uscire dall’angolo di una discussione, ci rifugiamo nell’inesattezza di una contabilità che non ci dà mai torto: diciamo “un milione di morti”, con la stessa disinvoltura con cui parleremmo di dollari o di bottiglie di vino. Un milione di morti non siamo capaci neanche di pensarlo, figuriamoci un milione e duecentoquarantamila, le vittime italiane, militari e civili, della Prima guerra mondiale. Eppure ci illudiamo di cavarcela così, rimasticando numeri per simulare una competenza che non abbiamo. Quando parliamo della Grande Guerra, siamo costretti a uscire dall’astrattezza e a entrare nei dettagli, e qui denunciamo tutta la nostra pochezza, perché all’ignoranza aggiungiamo una dolosa indifferenza. La scusa è la solita: è passato più di un secolo, e il tempo fa sempre lo stesso lavoro, cancella volti e immagini o li rende irriconoscibili. Perciò il volume che Aldo Sabatino ha messo insieme per ricordare i morti ...

#poem #jellyfish The moment when under the pretense of things taking shape everything follows a haphazard course: the look of whomever hates you kills your neighbor the yapping of the bodies laying out in the sun            has the transparency of jellyfish the memories of the jellyfish talk of revolutions washed up on the beach            the lipstick derails past the groove of the lips the kiss follows suit and loses its way too the heel breaks on the runway and nothing else happens just a nuisance the walk jamming up no comic effect the priest blesses the host and thinks of his mother   the mother who doesn’t know French tells her son j’ai prié pour toi the son suspects that Dr. Stevenson is right when he talks about bodily wounds migrating with the soul but he can’t confirm this because the doctor died before his mother a hapha...

The first to fall were the plants not by the will of time or fate but of the so-called gardener who had stuck them in the ground. Planted there overlooking the pit of the courtyard they were ridiculous: a puff of green around the grey on four rows of thin earth four failed flowerbeds if you strained a little sparrow’s graves not even worms were comfortable sleeping there. Facing the asphalt downwind from the cars they appeared to be mocking god knows what: the nature, the art, the technique of balance. But they were real plants with sap and leaves that really fell off and renewed  the circle of their existence their patterns,   being those of trees, always concentric. The birds that sheltered there were real birds with feathers and a beak and even the summer grasshoppers blew their axillary raspberries that you heard   until they wreaked havoc on your heart   during your afternoon nap. The plants had roots that burst t...