Concerning the universe, the city of God,
we know very little.

People talk and talk more
about black holes.

When I enter the cemetery
of San Felice a Ema
I have to go past many tombstones

A look in the mirror is enough
to convince us we’re someone else.

Those who dig up the past don’t need to be told
that hardly the millionth of a second

 

It was our lake, its waters a few spans wide,
and we were two lives too young to be old

I don’t even order a household slave
to slit my veins. Nothing troubles me.

When I enter hell, almost out of habit
I’ll shout Aspasia! at the first ghost who smiles.

 

A windfall of raucous jeers
swirls down on my bent head.
Earth burns, slant shadows

Not the cricket, but the cat
on the hearth, shining
household god of your scattered clan,

on which the lunar spring descends‚
blanching every shard with halo splendor,
chips of broken cones, sheen

Probably
evening is falling. Not because of the years,
which are numerous, but because the play

It was where the wooden bridge
crosses to Porto Corsini on the open sea
and a few men, in slow motion, lower

Now that the last shreds of tobacco
die at your gesture in the crystal bowl,
to the ceiling slowly

An “accelerated course” in French taste for tourists who are still in need of it ought to begin, in my opinion, with a visit to the Marché aux Puces and end with a visit to the studio of Georges Braque. On the one hand the odds and ends, coffee pots, cast-off rags, the second hand goods, in short, produced by several centuries of a unified and centralized culture; on the other, the same objects interpenetrated and flattened out in compositions that have little to do with the well-known genre of the nature morte, although they deserve the name much more legitimately than, for example, those by Chardin or Cézanne, which are so much more vives.