NAPLES, PASSER-BY

But our lot crawls between dry ribs
To keep our metaphysics warm–T.S. Eliot, Whispers of Immortality

I..

Tribal music from a department-store,
ice cream children, prams and fathers.
On neck and forehead, some faint blue
water from a bronze, public fountain.
I will bear alone the red sirocco.

II..

The vesuvius (bitter about
his constipations), speaks:
“Ask the peasants of Nola and the goat
cheese in their charred, broken stomachs,
ask the grey-haired nobles of Pompei and
display their ruined, ash-filled skulls,
once cracked by their own cooked brains,
when hit by my frisky mighty outflow,
that arrived quickly at the shore and dripped
quietly into the reluctant, raging sea”
Look at him and take a pill

.III.

Amidships with the fishermen, the bouncing
fenders, tanned hands grasping, we stop & float
above a swarm of fishes, almost still,
frozen, then shivers, awakes and flees, like
quicksilver-tears fleeing
the heat of silly hands

IV.

The pigeons slip on wet patio stones.
We hide in the cream-coloured chapel
and your eyes turn black; single, puny
prayers, unable to argue with the waterfall,
running over thumb-thick ancient moss.

–Michele Lamberti

TOTEM & TEATIME

I can no longer shop happily
–Lost in the supermarket, Strummer/Jones

1.
I trick the squirrel. My brother
and his girlfriend did the same.
On my knees, upon the concrete,
(like them besides the meadow),
I show him my left fist,
as if it isn´t empty,
but full of first-class Spanish nuts.
I know: he will not resist. The brown
blitz descends from a scots pine.
I open my fist
and it´s him.
Two spirits.
As I weigh his claws in my hand,
he sees exactly, that I have nothing.
Then he stares straight into my filthy face.
For a very long squirrel-time.

2.
Who am I to mess with
the ruler of this park?
Don´t you know: the white swan
is busy fighting naked children;
the big-headed black swan sells
dull feathers on a seedy TV show.
All the others do not count. Now:
Do you know who I am?

3.
That night,
naked in front of my mirror,
I wrote: “You shall not
eat a squirrel” on my chest
and loved the living
colour of each letter.

–Michele Lamberti