Paolo Roversi

There's a sense of urgency in her face that I feel in my heart.

"somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond

any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands"

by E. E. Cummings

Paolo Roversi

New Endymion

BY W. S. DI PIERO

She visits still too much, dressed in aromas

of fir needles, mango, mold: I still get lost

knowing she’s close, me not getting younger

or more conscious. Sometimes I fantasticate

I’m broad awake: her witchy presence waits

for me to jump into her arms, but then she’s just

an incoherent ache in sleep’s freaked scenes.

I feel her frosty nitrogenous hands and wrists

vaporing nooses around my head and feet

and genitals, conjuring my drab hair

into a party bowl of oiled, desirable locks.

She makes me nervous, but what would I do

without her? So long as I can’t have her,

I want her and this alarming manic frequency.

Then again, who wants to wake to change,

its pulped, smelly suit of meat, drawing flies?

My night-watch hot girl, moon-maiden, mom,

let me get just one night’s sleep without regret,

released from your foxy ticklish fondlings,

your latest smell of windblown fresh-cut grass.