POEMS FROM THE PAST

Mario’s Study

5 march 1976

Angry centuries on the bookshelves.

Electric sharpener filled to its grisly
death teeth with skin and bones.

He belonged to the second group; he
says he believes in the Silence of the Light.

It goes with the dust here, she says.

She flies erratically on the back of her
thoughts of waiting women to
the velvet tongue across turned wood,
to settle like wine on the evening
shadows, to relieve a bloodless
tension, to say why care?

But an aching distant throat jumped
into her goblet and cried, as tiny as
a stillborn diamond, “Listen,
silence is not yet a dead subject.”