Translated from the Italian by Mikica Pindzo

Image used for representation.

Coming around, saturated with skin
the weaver, the apothecary among
his grafts, in the art of the wheel
initiated by love,
will be the expanded tributary without
God of the first heart, observatory,
core and coldness of axes turning
into sound, the germ a thunderbolt, in a time
without a place of his return.

What doesn’t happen remains
supreme, and yet through
the grains of an unspoken word falls
faithful to the lineage of Eleusis.
Head of an animal, dying soul
a garment that stays after the body has
vanished.

Invisibly
taken from his Event,
a child picks it up
hands it to the rock.

Perhaps, forgotten, it can happen?

Amulet, beyond the blooming,
is skin fortified by
the cave. Elsewhere the body
waits, for the first
time. Rodin seals, Renoir
keeps quiet, every wall starts
the prayer. The infinite shape
strips the voice imploded:
in simultaneous pain?
Neither life nor death: it lives
exposes itself, seed in a circle
bleeds, resting
on the glass, the shape of every earthly
thing mirrored in us, finds
its home in breath, falling.

An insect at night,
is a horde, if beside
the blood, the orphan
spills his milk.

Grapes go beyond the snow,
in the white earth loses
a specific hunger, the flame in the lily
smooths hands, cheeks, snow
inexhaustible between earth
in rapture: atrocious earth.
A monk, the grass, lascivious
caresses the statue in the cloister,
his hand melts life in the cold,
he invokes the dragon
his gaze clinging to longed-for
martyrdom. A drop of urine
flows between the hair of his leg, weaves
its holy baptism with the creator.
The monk observes the snow:
if the yellow trail
was the Immobility that falters
in the pupil of his Lord.

Also, read short French poems by Dominique Penez, translated into English by Patrick Williamson, and published in The Antonym:

Extracts From ‘To An Imaginary Lover’— Dominique Penez

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About Author

Paolo Fichera founded and directed, from 2003 to 2009, the four-monthly print magazine PaginaZero-Letterature di frontiera. He has published the following poetry collections: Lo speziale (LietoColle, 2005); Innesti (Quaderni di Cantarena, 2007); La strada della cenere (FaraEditore, 2007); nel respiro (L’arcolaio, 2009); Bosco (Anterem Edizioni, 2013); Figura (Musicaos Editore, 2019). He won the XXVI edition of the Lorenzo Montano Prize in 2012. He has been published in anthologies, and national and international websites and magazines. He has been translated into English, French, Spanish, Arabic, Serbo-Croatian, Russian, Latvian, and Albanian. He is the Italian editor of the French poet August Picard. As part of the project Ipotesi di vita (2008-2012), he collaborated on projects mixing poetry and the visual arts, music, dance, and video poetry, including the video reading project Cryptare and digital book dormi come visibile. He contributed his poems to the anthological catalogue Risonanze del visibile by painter Marino Iotti, edited by Claudio Cerritelli, Edizioni Edicta di Parma, 2011. In 2017, he began collaborating with the butoh dancer Ambra Gatto Bergamasco, producing three theatrical performances to date: Cerchio |Preghiera. Uno in uno; Rosa e Pietra; A Cor Leggero—cartografia per gesto segno e verso. Together with Ambra Gatto Bergamasco, he wrote the book Notazione (metrica delle ossa: tra butoh e poesia), Giulio Perrone Editore, 2022. In the publishing field, he has collaborated with Mondadori, Touring Editore, DeAgostini, Editoriale Domus, Skira, EDB, Cairo Editore, White Star, Pearson, and Wikipedia.

About Translator

Mikica Pindzo was born in Sarajevo (Bosnia-Herzegovina) and has lived in Italy since the 1990s, first in Florence, and now in Milan. She is a poet and she worked as a translator in the tertiary sector and promoted translations of Croatian and Bosnian authors.