Aim

David Trame

A word starting at sea,
getting a loud pointed surge in the middle
and finishing in a suspension,
your mouth closed
and in your breath
the same tightness as ‘climb’.

It entered me
in the quiet of this day,
the slow surf in its trim of lappings
while two terns knifed the light clouds
in a silvery wake.
I stopped on the sea road,
the breeze a gaze on my skin,
and recognized that silence
that is fullness
and tastes beyond anything
you can strive for.

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Air

David Trame

A humming gaze
facing your being alone.

Sea breeze, the barely audible
hiss of the wave crests
or in a field a rustling line
of grass blades.

Or on the top of the mountain
when at the end of the rise
you have passed the last
fingers of fir-trees,
roots exposed between earth and sky.

On the cleared top,
on the neat grey bareness of the rock,
in the quiet alertness
of travelling shadows.

Where as a child
you whispered – I will and I won’t –
and wanted to make
definitive vows, an unshakeable
stream of promise.

Now you simply try
to say nothing, to let thoughts
hiss away slowly,
hearing only the moment –
that that has never changed.

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Campo S. Giovanni e Paolo

David Trame

I am sitting here, at a table of a bar
facing the hospital, waiting for you
in the dusk, stones and sky absorbing
swallows’ wings and people’s voices
that are neat and smooth
like the skin of this marble.
A hospital that was a monastery you told me,
I don’t know anything more about it
except that I was born there and that’s there
where all started, in an evening like this maybe,
in the quietened bustle of the hazy air, this
is all I am given to know, this
is the certainty I can’t but cling to
while I am waiting for you,
for your silhouette appearing there
under the white, big arch of the door.

Now you appear, with a sign
you tell me everything is all right
and walk briskly towards my table,
we have made it, another routine check is done.
Another tassel in the steps and wings of our time.
Before leaving the campo I again gaze at the hospital,
at the neat outlines of sculptures facing me in a line,
faces so tangible and close in their stares
like the tight breath of our identity,
an illusion maybe but which I cherish so much,
because the lagoon is just emptiness in the night
behind these marble walls
with the sea currents running unchecked
and with further behind the simple unknown,
while we walk now under these yellow streetlights
that chatter along, with us,
on the way back home.

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