Franca Mancinelli

“I worked with death

in my heart for a month.”

And her eyes brim at the thought

of the nights a river was clogged up

on the other side of the bed,

slow with refuse. Then, in deep

sleep a massive building site

refastened life to four bridges.

It’s been twenty years that we’ve slept

together and only now

I know that the blood

goes from my atrium to his.

winded for days

we follow the rivers, the paths

now we should disrupt

the tracks and fall

mimicking the end.

They will quickly pass over us

in a trot of dirty hooves.

The fear of thin fault lines

will descend until its lost.

So we get up again

with eyes that do not heal

the darkness does not repair.

like poisonous red ants

they descended in you they rise

through a crack in the ground

finding in your face

a good bowl.

With the constancy of insects

we come back against this

light that doesn’t open, that breaks us

how much longer will we knock

at the glass that separates

oxygen from the heart?

I slept on a page every white

night. The morning

a shadow of my weight, some creases

and straight off it turned: going on

is this next-line of the principle,

a mouth that passes heat

to the air as if it could wake

still be saved.

The air was inert, full of tremors and shaking, lightning that could rip it apart. A retreat was needed, keep life safe, push it to areas where pockets of quiet opened up and light could gather, ripen. This is how I grew in this amputated form. The street nearby you can see how it burns within me.

I was a house inhabited by wild plants that portrude in the voids, they wrap in the cracks of the walls. The door? Someone would say to someone that enters and leaves it open. But this house has forgotten his door, it has swallowed the bite left for a while in the throat. So they can come and go like swallows searching for refuge and then, free again, they call with pleasure and puncture the air.

An arrow not from any hunt

not from any war

silent tongue battered by the wind

dark torch, marks the confines

of our life in hard

fragrant bark

tattooed in stellar trails.

Its roots rise out of the ground. It has grown them like branches. It has not protected them from the dark.  We do not know where it breathes. And how many it has that sink dizzying, invisible. But those which it has exposed to death, the surfaced hardened veins show us its strength more than the foliage that rises to the sky.

I started to stoop, to take the road back. I go out to brothers who press - my nocturnal bifurcations. The surface is broken in birth. I brush against it - the thrill of a fulfilment. The sky has the smell of my lymph. I have confined myself. - My most majestic stature.

I wrote what I wanted to tell you

under my eyelids. Tomorrow

as soon as I reopen them you will read.

But just look at me and I will not have

to carry all of the white between my lashes.

Give me your eyes and I will be saved.

I’ve stopped holding up the walls,

devoted myself to the collapses.

I start again; clipped,

I go back to what I am:

a lizard that splits itself

in half with death.

I have seen the eyes of the trees

In the denseness a shock

of light

left to keep watch over us

like heavy

rain that is waiting.

In the garden the grown ups’ cars remain unlocked, some times with the key in the ignition. You can enter and sit in the driver’s seat and take your brother in the passanger seat, friends in the back, or leave alone, and go and go, steer the wheel around the bend, a little bit to the right and a little bit to the left, push the brake pedal or the accelerator, looking in the rear view mirror at what remains. And go, and go, and go, in front a similar fixed immage: the linden leaves that bloom in the light, the little round eyes of the budgerigars in the cage.

The elderly woman that lives in the near building some times goes out in the balcony: she sweeps, hangs out the washing on the line, she collects them, she waters two flowerpots. When she departs, she will leave a clean, ordered space, that has brought the form of her life. They are simple gestures that she repeats each day, conforming the border of her own presence and her own absence. That istinctive, reasonable precision, guides me through short sequences that allows me to remove the dust, to rearrange things. And tidy the rooms, opening a clear space in my mind: resurfacing thorough the fog, slowly taking my place, here, on these coordinates in the space.

the roommate of disemboweled

farmhouses returns today

like a bramble to console you.

Dogs on their backs

waiting to be pet,

scattered bedbugs,

paws in the air walking

looking for ground.

The earth, a dark page:

what happens is written

shatters and crumbles

in the dark reaches

the meaning, it gets lost.

the ants in stagnant blood

swarm the bodies

that don’t conjoin.

Sometimes it is a meeting of rocks

they clash and roll together

until the first obstacle or at the end

of the slope. And also us

who raised the world on the horizon

immersed ground

beyond the openings of the room

we will wake up covered in snow

on the two sides of the bed

a morning divided

arms conjoined

to scissors. 

The uncomplete phrases remain ruined. There is an entire village in danger of crumbling that you are supporting within yourself. You know the pain of each tile, of each brick that is falling down. A dull thud in the clearing of your chest. It should be someone’s costant love, its quiet presence that sounds in the depth of the wood: you that finally returns, you that unpacks the suitcase, you that forgets to leave.

he pruned me much

he took away death:

in pain you would

have known the name

mine or another:

He asked: «will it have stopped raining?»

I still had the years

to know, to enter

in the house and to leave

wounding myself or sheltered, while he

followed the occurrence with a finger

knew where the veins went.

In the garden, near the brick well, a steel elbow emerges from the earth. There a plastic tube is connected that crawls on the grass until it reaches the plot. In the evening, with a cigarette between the fingers, looking at the sky as it darkens like wet earth, my father waters. The fruits are always smaller then he expects, they some times fill his hands and a dirty basket on the dresser. When he is there, hidden by the tomatoes, in the farthest corner of the garden, I can hear the water pouring down between the earth granules, until it reaches the waiting roots. Here grow grasses that are hard to uproot, small flowered weeds, poisoned fruit plants, bird food. But I can’t hoe them away, I can’t repair the flap. 

I see inside the gangrene opened

with gestures, and I stop sprouting

this useless resin.

Then with my lips I pick myself up

and take me to bed

as a cat would with her kitten. 

you don’t distinguish a nest

from a mess of gestures,

you don’t distinguish a look from a well

you don’t distinguish the arms

from the ivy that strangles the fence.

One hour of sleep from here

you wake up sniffing the traces

of the man who yesterday wore

your very clothes.

Growing every day

for the right cut, starting again

and never reaching themselves -

custody is broken

from birth nothing

more than filaments

good for burning.

These texts comes from a collaboration with the Artist Sebastiano Guerrera in a project of drawings and words dedicated to trees. http://www.romberg.it/guerrera

she dangles her burnt feet in space

to one side of the bed;

the floor holds her face

in marble veins. The light spreads

like a stain. Someone,

bungling, has spilt another day.

To be traced again

streets will come back to shoes that go 

confirming the borders

of things among things. 

When you can see again you will find everything supported by branches. Nothing has happened. We are here, upon this framework of leaves. At times a cry opens up the throat. We lose warmth. It then  cradles us in the gentle wind.

what I am is a window

the weight I had has been collected

in dark bags by dawn.

Every movement beyond the room

can now carry you

and the bright traffic slows down

so that the overturned hat

might hold a coin.

These creatures loyal to the water will show you the way. As far as they can resist, roads still open up, branching out. You can follow their trembling track. - Our first breath.

they wash out the perimeters. From here

you continue groping

steps backwards

until where it began your disappearance

until you return

lost in the features

like an inheritance

a pair of eye glasses.

I immerse myself again in the good

blue body of a Sunday

morning, sister to others

without hair or eyes who are silent

like on a day of work

along corridors

with other shades alongside.

But in this light of saliva,

chlorine and semen,

our peels abandoned,        

gesture after gesture we enter, children

with a mark of water into church. 

towards the last embers

slowly the evening to walk

then to trash about and to sleep covered in blood.