The Embrace Poem by Valerio Magrelli

As you rest beside me, I lean over
and by your face I catch hold of sleep
the way one wick
catches hold of another wick's flame.
There, two night lights, flicker
as fire is passed, and sleep takes hold.
But in that hold thunders
the basement furnace.
Down there a fossile nature burns,
Prehistory is ablaze, and dead
submerged peat ferments, and flares
into my radiators.
In a dark halo of heating oil
our little room is a nest warmed
by organic residues, by bonfires, by scum.
And we wicks are the two tongues
of that single Paleozoic torch.