EXILIENCE
I.
You spend your time in your synapses,
from January to May when it is more visible
even to an eye turned to itself
— you wander along the horizons of Orion,
celestial California according to sources
less partial than yourself, greeting its stars
like old acquaintances, flighty and prone to implosion:
Betelgeuse the female in the middle,
Bellatrix the warrior, Rigel the brilliant blue-white,
the belt suggesting a waistline
that the town with its sign on the hills
would award with a contract for three features
— so when you challenge Ocean and Cronus and fly West,
its absence from the summer sky should not surprise you,
you should be content of trampling its terrestrial twin:
but the mental exile is defined by an absence,
by that slice of mislaid world,
by what you always think you’ll find
but that you lose, and then regret.
II.
The feeling on arrival is not one
of shed skin, abandoned by a reptile
that’s cold of blood and ingratitude:
it is something oblique, even twofold,
injected with guilt at the thought of true exile,
of those who leave an everything of tragedy
directed to the nothing of the unknown:
but the gash that opens up punctually
every time a flap rotates, a landing gear descends
and two giant wheels screech on the tarmac
is almost cumbersome, tactile in its presence,
and for days exudes the translucent serum
of laceration — and treating it is part
of the fractal emotion of being here,
West of yourself, and at the same time
there, from whence you left.
III.
Sometimes sleep begets more confusion
than repose, especially when it mocks you
lustrous and slippery and amphibious,
when it whets and recedes like foam at water’s edge:
and for the time it takes to sort out
your awakening’s bureaucracy
you can’t remember if it’s here or there
that the rear windows of home are spied by neighbors
looking at what you pack in your suitcase
or else greeted by the open vulva
chiseled into the rock south by southwest,
if the explosion of sounds in the night
is a chorus of cheers for a winning game
or a red-toothed skirmish of raccoons
in the thick of the privet in the backyard:
you can’t even recall the correlation itself
between the here and there, which one comes first
and which one follows, where is the arrival
and where the starting point: but it is then
that it occurs to you that this is you,
bicontinental ringer of yourself but still,
who knows for how long, traceable back to yourself.
IV.
You dress in white in honor
of the evening, as if to impersonate
someone that you’re not,
the non-existent seaman in his conquered peace
— you sit down facing this panel of sky
and just west of your left hemisphere
(the one, you seem to remember,
where language always lurks)
you feel hemmed in by this tree
that where you come from was thought
to cure malaria: grateful, you breath
the message that Nature compels it to bring
and for a moment you find it so explicit
that you believe it was intended just for you
— forgetting that all around you,
and down the canyon where the earth
surrenders to the waves, there is nothing left
that registers even the slightest trace
of what drives you, what governs you.
V.
You look at her and think:
she’s had the courage of the past,
and now has added a few months
to a tally that goes back to an ancestral, forming time
onto the sediment of what makes her real, a body
stoked and ridden by a faraway breath
that stretches thin but never breaks:
her map has showed an unexpected backbone
— a jagged, sinuous line from the Baltic frost
to the mood swings of the Balkans —
and yet, however enticed you may be,
you can’t make up your mind and take the test.
Maybe you fear, inside the punctual envelope
or in the ethereal, virus-prone Web copy,
an all-too-clear answer to this seizing magnet
— maybe the simple power of some shared limestone,
the shattered coral memory of two oceans
flooding a karstic river in perennial flood,
a mighty coursing geology that does not befit
the pangs of your synapses: or maybe
you just dread the jolt of a not-quite-so-hidden metaphor
to the bridge of yourself, the one that links
the seismic past and future of two lands,
the ancestral and the elective.
Thus you defer, forever tottering
between there and here.
Bio:
Stefano Bortolussi is a poet, novelist and literary translator. In his native Italy he has published three poetry collections (Ipotesi di caldo, 2001; Califia, 2014; I labili confini, 2016) and four novels (Fuor d’acqua, 2004; Fuoritempo, 2007; Verso dove si va per questa strada, 2013; Billy & Coyote, 2017). His poetry has been also published in magazines and webzines, both Italian and international, such as Interno Poesia, Atelier, Ink, Sweat and Tears and Words for the Wild.
OVUNQUE SIAMO 