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Beyond the limits of urban landscape
V mov.: Le lune di Saturno (saturnalia)
Three little girls grew tired of this
in Balashikha but not the short-sighted
omnipotence of the conservative
former minister freely promising
to everyone happiness, even to billions
of Chinese and Indians (and then he dies
just like a dog like everyone else):
the same promise made to a handful of Jews
(all dead and buried for generations)
by a god counting minutes and money.
If ever there were such a god, he would deserve
to be dead, extinguished not in embers,
but in ashes, consumed and fallen upon
the shoulders of every righteous people.
Under an iron sky of solid clouds
with the colour of a hostile glance
(no Ovid ever saw any like this)
what is permanence, the memory
of wrongdoing, the justice of history,
the mockery of an exile’s lament?
and what value do you read in the landscape,
the eye distracted, the step oblique,
tense,
crispé
, crouched up, stooping,
halted on the verge of change
on the brink of horizons dark and livid
like a burnished steel blade?
a sordid thrill of eternities
torn to pieces, a rotten garden
mud feeding diseased roots:
will this ruin then generate summer?
the Feasts of March cry on the windowpanes
and chill the eyes,
raindrops on the sea, poison
in the wind on the irises, geraniums,
in a chameleon garden,
toad hedges at the far end of the room,
slimy horror, morbid cadence.
Under a white sky slave to disillusion,
in a landscape of ice and silence,
a snow flake floated down slowly:
erratic torment, sweet grace,
this is the day I always wait for,
a spiral transforming every substance,
a spark, a Siberian whirlwind,
static deformation of the air,