DAVIDE TRAME Reminder Dirt on the snow path, a flash that will stay: the dark spots of dogs’ and deer’s droppings that look like seeds – the
latter, and both clearly reminding of earth and matter, splotches of dark on the immaculate
whiteness, the tearing sharpness of the snow’s glare. Maybe it’s just what we
need: gazing at our dirt enhancing mortality that is dark like the soil, like the tangle of entrails in everything, the layers
of dark on which we stand. We gaze at them walking on, and finding some familiar respite from the marvellous
estrangement of white. The Same The old mother forgets, we assist at the jumble in the windmill of her
memory, there’s this careless,
relaxed, river of events, muddled up in a talking that is
endless… before the war, after the
war, decades, months, weeks, the
trudging now in the web of days, now and then, the same, in
the constant fading present and our
desperate attempt at reassembling, with the
shoring up of reminding. Nothing new, it’s easy to
foresee the jumble in the strength of the incoming tide, the fading made of many crumbling matchsticks and the vast wave of the
debris, pinpointed but mostly
quiet, in the oncoming night. The old mother looks out of the window at the morning weather, when asked she says she has
forgotten if it’s raining or snowing, we see her maybe just
attracted by a detail in a plant, a new red berry
–say, when in her laziness she
starts to digress about this new befallen
strangeness, and maybe a sunbeam in the
meantime casts fresh shadows on the
lawn and everything is the same,
present and gone. Boundaries The driver has come, the bus is going to leave, I sit and gaze at him at
the steering wheel with the glossy black
buttons by it and the windshield with its
sheet of milk-white, swirls of breath and dirt, the
fog, always at one with the
workday, in its skin and constancy. I’m well within my
boundaries. Very familiar. Behind, the historic city- that by now seems to exist only to be prized and left
behind- and in front the factories
and blocks of flats, the reality where I need to
go, the winning geometry of boxes, squares,
rectangles and lines for those who need to stay
and move. I am thinking that time has passed, that I have less time left. It’s inevitable to think
about the inevitable. I look at the windshield, at the fog that is always
the same, within the boundaries that
are what I know, on the surfaces where I
need to slide and go. Now the driver is turning
the wheel with supple arms while, as it happens, the fog suddenly rises, I look around at the same
boundaries, never the same under a
patch of light. Skin Caravaggio’s bodies, alive and dead. The here-and-now of their
nakedness, their luminous closeness. Always amazing what’s utterly ours. The pores and veins’
infinitesimal throbs and a glow, our glow, that
transpires. And eyes, eyes that grab
you like cries and the cheekbones, the
sinews, that dig at once into the
moment’s marrow. In the silence and fury our soul’s presence, which is nothing but the body’s exuberance. I am trapped now in the
normal marshes’ mud and clouds, my mind crossed by those flesh and bones’ grip
and gaze by which we created the
gods and they us, when we stared and stood
still and nobody could resist the earth and light’s
tendons, our skin, piercing the mist. | 