If, from such affliction and so many gems
we learned nothing but to live askance
ever lighting approximate fires,
the sibyl of the waters in the grotto,
mineral words, damp in mute light;
if with so many honed adzes
we learned nothing but to speak words of darkness,
plowing the field, rich with eyes, of the gloom,
the gold with the spectacles of the night,
if we learned but to utter the absent snow
of so many desiccated gales,
if we knew to abstain from the snow
as the rook abstains from the word,
if we are nothing but the thumb of the snow,
aimed at the rock of parched light,
light-parched, snow-parched, and there in the word
we know to speak splendor ablaze in its cages,
like the moribund nightingale telling
when the mares of the darkness will approach.
If from so many censures and conquests
the territory cannot shatter the wasteland,
in the vineyard of the country of air,
like the barrens of the bristling water,
the catafalque of conflagrated clarity,
the church submerged in Nostalghia,
the harlequinade of the clarid,
if we do not know the word of the last rites
of dead air, of air buffered by wind,
the plutonic blister of air,
still we know that to live is the Latin
the bird spoke as it chanted to Percival,
it is the melodious Latin of leaves,
it is the trilling of luminance
(love: the trilling of luminance),
we know it all, like Chrétien de Troyes
or Carles Riba, we know it all, we clasp
the burning air of obstinacy,
the flickering wick of the bomb
that scorches our hand, the chloratite
of Red Brigades in the Siennese night; Etruscan light
of Etruscan masks in search of the absolute,
the intransigent light of the morning,
the dawn and the night of our love, life:
a red kerchief daubed with blood.