Stefano Dal Bianco

to the reader

Under the mountain, on the edge of the meadow,
close to the mountain stream of Planaval,
...

I am the fruit that your staying has generated.

I rebel not and stay close to you
because our hunger
like a death drags us on high
above our three-room apartment
beyond the roller shutters
which, like males do, in your defence,
I lower for the night.

But sometimes I abandon you and wait for dawn
when a skylark actually does sing
in the garden, and makes peace,
and we are no longer two poles attracting one another
but only this peace
and this sky finally clear
lost beyond summer windows.
...

I saw the brightest moon ever
rise from behind the mountain
and did nothing.
I didn't speak nor think
...

When I lie down on the carpet in the hall and look up, sometimes there is a fly
sometimes a gnat that in flying traces strangely geometric trajectories, suddenly and
continuously turning at a usually acute angle,
...

I went out to walk towards this sea, but I must deny this
because I had gone out and in reality almost immediately
I met a plane tree and am stuck with writing about it,
...

I have two twenty-year old sheets
and a flowered pillow-case
that I keep at home for close friends,
...

If you are watching a mother sleeping in an armchair
on any winter afternoon siesta
with the television temporarily off
...

One evening, I was late, with a towel, inadvertently, I knocked over a precious bottle
of perfume, which fell. The pieces were picked up, almost all of them right away,
others in the course of time,
...

The peach-tree that I see blossoming among the ruins of the city of Milan is not life
triumphing over cement, but only cement air, a life of cement inside the tree, my life.
Our life eluded on the roof-tops.
...

The road is paved,
black like the reflection of the earth around it
like the foliage of the trees
...