Rome May 2024

that, if one does not know it, Rome has an oppressive and saddening effect during the first days because of the lifeless and unhealthy atmosphere of museums which it exhales, because of the numberless monuments of the past, which have been hauled out and laboriously restored, and from which a tiny present draws nourishment, and because of the dreadful over-estimation of these deformed and ruined objects, which is supported by philologists and copied by the conventional Italian tourists; though at bottom they are nothing more than the chance remains of another epoch and of a life which is not, and should not be, ours. Finally, after weeks of daily self-defence, though still a little bewildered, one comes to oneself again and one says, “No, there is no more beauty here than elsewhere, and all these objects, which generation after generation has continued to admire and which the hands of jobbers have repaired and restored, mean nothing, are nothing, and have no heart and no value”; but there is plenty of beauty here, because there is plenty of beauty everywhere. Waters infinitely full of life flow over the old aqueducts into the great town. They dance in its many squares over white stone bores and spread themselves out in broad roomy basins. They murmur by day and lift up their murmuring by night, which is vast here and starry and soft with breezes. And there are gardens here, unforgettable avenues and staircases, staircases thought out by Michelangelo, staircases which are built in the likeness of downward-gliding waters

—the steps in their broad descent-giving birth one to the other like waves. By such impressions does one pull oneself together and win oneself back from all the claims of the many things which talk and chatter here—and how talkative they are!—and one learns slowly to recognise the few things in which there dwells eternity, which one can love, and solitude, in which one can quietly share.

Rilke, Letters To A Young Poet (Rome, 29 Oct 1903, read 14 May 2024)

Las flores de esta ciudad, no huelen a na'

¿Por qué será, Por qué será?

Y todas las chicas son tan bonitas, tan plasticas

Flor de sakura

Ser una popstar nunca te dura

No me da pena, me da ternura

No pa' siempre puedes ser una estrella y brillar

Voy a reírme cuando tenga 80 y mire pa' atrás

Nunca me ha dao' miedo la risa de un loco

Más miedo me da el que miente o el que ríe poco

Si tienes 60 y te endiablas cuando una mujer frontea

Es que no has aprendi'o na', es que tienes un problema

La que sabe, sabe

Que si estoy en esto es para romper

Y si me rompo con esto, pues me romperé

Y que solo hay riesgo si hay algo que perder

Las llamas son bonitas porque no temen a arder

Y el fuego es bonito porque todo lo rompe

Rosalía, SAKURA

I slept in a room filled with white moths. In a wooden house in the lower Carpathians—Beskid Niski—each silvery night. I made my bed in the room's far corner, white moths settling like quiet petals on every surface as evening fell. They folded their wings and clung to the walls without a quiver as I undressed. I knew, as soon as I switched off the lamp, that the air would go pale with their fluttering. I knew, in my sleep, one might light on my arm, on my cheek, in my hair, without waking me. In this room, also, the seeds of wildflowers gleaned from the meadows were spread out to dry. What I learned about gentleness then. What I learned to be gently less wary of. I want not to forget those nights in the lower Carpathians, deep spring, sleeping alone: the white moths swirling as I dreamt; the meadows baring themselves to the moon.

Cecilia Woloch, Postcard to Myself from the Lower Carpathians, Spring

And despite everything, in this hard year where I lost it all and more, here comes May, which is more than I deserve, dripping in lilacs and bleeding hearts against a grass so green, it takes your breath away. And I still have breath, pink lungs to send it in and out, a heart that’s still beating in spite of itself, and skin that feels blessed to be caressed by this sun-kissed wind, this cloudless day.

Barbara Crooker

The sweet blessing of school, work, grocery shopping, looking men into their eyes & laughing with my teeth showing. This is why I am grateful every single day, no matter the cards I have to play, I must smile bigger with every wound & never clench my fist in spite. This is why I kneel to my parents & their strength to risk what was left of their lives 30 years ago. This luck, this random ordering of the universe, I can barely feel the other skin & heart existing so close yet so far from my own reality - I feel so distanced from it that all I have is a sense of responsibility, a sense of having to live well, live fully, for the twisted sake of what could've been. The words of gratitude I speak to myself every morning & night, the same words dreamt by those who didn’t have enough to pay the smuggler. Sometimes I still think of my aunt & uncle who had to go into their backyard and pick up the torn limbs from their bombed children, all dead under age 10. My life. My life. My life. I will press all of this deep into my heart, I will live & die knowing I was afforded a great mercy.

Here is a moment of extravagant beauty: I drink it liquid from the shells of my hands and almost all of it runs sparkling through my fingers: but beauty is like that, it is a fraction of a second, quickness of a flash and then immediately it escapes.

Clarice Lispector, A Breath Of Life

I promised no poems about you. I'm sorry:

I managed to leave

you off the page

but couldn't stop writing

about love. Soon the snow

will melt & we'll climb

mountains with nothing but shoes on our feet.

I'll take myself

places I haven't been

in years. The future feels

wide open, I feel wide open. If you listened

to my chest it would sound

like a river ice breakup,

like I just learned how to breathe.

Kyla Jamieson, Vernal Equinox

Where will I go next

when I could see my life in every small town,

know my roots don't take much pull,

and the world swings open

like a front door home.

Schuyler Peck, After Nikita Gill

What lay on the road was no mere handful of snake. It was the copperhead at last, golden under the street lamp. I hope to see everything in this world before I die. I knelt on the road and stared. Its head was wedge-shaped and fell back to the unexpected slimness of a neck. The body itself was thick, tense, electric. Clearly this wasn't black snake looking down from the limbs of a tree, or green snake, or the garter, whizzing over the rocks. Where these had, oh, such shyness, this one had none. When 1 moved a little, it turned and clamped its eyes on mine; then it jerked toward me. I jumped back and watched as it flowed on across the road and down into the dark. My heart was pounding. I stood a while, listening to the small sounds of the woods and looking at the stars. After excitement we are so restful. When the thumb of fear lifts, we are so alive.

Mary Oliver, May

Sometimes I dream

that everything in the world is here, in my room, in a great closet, named and orderly,

and I am here too, in front of it,

hardly able to see for the flash and the brightness—

and sometimes I am that madcap person clapping my hands and singing;

and sometimes I am that quiet person down on my knees.

Mary Oliver, Something - Why I Wake Early

Che strano sorriso vive per esserci e non per avere ragione in questa piazza chi confida e chi consola di colpo tacciono

è giugno, in pieno sole, l’abbraccio nasce

non domani, subito

il pomeriggio, i riflessi sui tavoli del ristorante non danno spiegazioni

vicino alle unghie rosse coincidono con le frasi questa è la carezza

che dimentica e dedica mentre guarda dentro la tazzina le gocce

rimaste e pensa al tempo e alla sua unica parola d’amore: «adesso».

La luce sulle tempie, Milo De Angelis

What a strange smile lives to be here and not to be right in this square he who confides and he who consoles are suddenly silent it's June, in broad daylight the embrace comes not tomorrow, now

the afternoon, the reflections on the restaurant tables near the red fingernails give no explanations they match the talk this is the caress

that forgets and dedicates while he looks inside the coffee cup at the remaining drops and thinks of the time and his only word of love: "now."

Resemblances, Milo De Angelis

“The enduring is something that must be accounted for. One cannot simply shrug it off.”

—Walker Percy

Mornings just keep coming. And even if I protested by laying up in the palmettos and staying put for a few days, eventually I’d have to get up and move along. No matter what happens to me, how this thing I’ve become evolves under the sun, or doesn’t, there’s always hope to find somewhere, or mad scientists to thwart, or government men to corral, or folks to save from disaster (self-generated or not). I mean, just look at this coastline. Salt water chews on it every single day. It loses pieces of itself, recedes toward the marsh, slowly but with absolute certainty. And yet its reeds keep singing in the wind, and its cypress branches reach for sun each day. Even if we all think we know how its story ends, the coast holds its line. Strong and resolute. Who am I to wake and not do the same?

Jack B. Bedell, Swamp Thing never finished The Moviegoer but knows Walker Percy had a few things figured out