to my mother
I.
Your smile is a line on the squared-off
page of childhood and the question
spreads opens - will you come tomorrow?-
I'll come like the rain promised in the scent
of sky, but the earth is waiting to wash
the dryness that cuts it to the core.
The rain changes the combination,
atoms are launched in your throat
in search of my embrace and patience
cultivates it behind your woman's shoulder,
inside your heart that is growing
old and rushing to the top - will I reach you
in time for our ring-a-ring-o'-roses? -
II.
You tighten the days around your ankles, you touch
the wound where the lorry hit
your hips, where polio ran you
over, dictating its law in the bone
too white to win.
You never cease to dream fields
of water east of the house - the rooms for food
on the ground floor, above where
we slept - together to not forget the mystery
inside the first years, the first airplanes
of a war. Yours was a short childhood
of chilblains and a spring without stockings
was not enough to keep death
distant. The front a hole in the hearth and
all the stories vanished.
III.
Destiny wanted you bent like
a story no one
wants to carry along. I was the mulberry tree
in the courtyard, you a clearing
behind the field and a
great wish to escape.
The Gallarate road still passes
between the ditches, beyond the concrete of houses
sprouted in the seventies, like a tree
in the white of autumn.
Now you say - Sunday is the longest
day inside the head -
I know, it's hard when the hours are
an account drawn straight between
one chair and another.
IV.
The front door is only a line now
on the perimeter - threshold open no more -
and time cultivates its liturgy,
an exact order between here and heaven.
Inside space is not meters or corners,
but a fold where you sit in the morning and stay.
The room, a leap with eyes shut tight
- always another gesture to make -
but you do not know it, you are still the enchanted
child, feet uncertain in the pattern.
At night you grow tenacious, like the owl
frightened by the brevity of dreams.
The hours lay closed in a hanky and childhood
grows no longer not even in memories.
Not even if you call it by its name.
You knit, you sew guilt onto your joy.
I sit, stubborn, set on making the world go round
where the roses of our promise
bloom.
Gabriela Fantato was born in 1960 in Milan, where she teaches Italian in a secondary school. Her texts have appeared in various magazines, anthologies and literary sites. She has won international literary prizes, including the "Eugenio Montale" (2004). She has published several collections of poetry, Fugando(1996); Enigma (2000); Moltitudine (2001); Northern Geography, with English translation by E.Di Pasquale (2002); Il tempo dovuto (2005) and Forse una geometria (2005). Her critical essays include: L'incontro con lo straniero, note su F. Romagnoli, A. Pozzi, D. Menicanti, C. Campo e M.L. Spaziani (Crocetti editore, 2000); Una geografia spirituale, la poesia di Cesare Pavese (Crocetti editore, 2002). She edited the anthology of criticism, Sotto la superficie, letture di poeti italiani contemporanei (1970-2004), (Bocca editore, 2004). Her story "Il battito" appears in the anthology Canti di Venere (Borelli editore, 2005). She has written opera libretti in verse, Messer Lievesogno e la Porta Chiusa (Teatro Comunale di Bologna, 1997); La bella Melusina (Teatro Quirino, Roma 1998); L'elefante di Annibale (Auditorium di Milano, 2000); Salomè Saltatrix (Villa Reale, Monza, 1999); Enigma (Piccolo Teatro, Milano 2000); Ghost Cafè (Teatro Donizetti, Bergamo 2000). She directs the journal of poetry, art and philosophy "La Mosca di Milano" and on the editorial board of the magazine "La Clessidra".