David Trame is an Italian teacher of English, born and living in Venice-Italy. Writing poems exclusively in English since 1993, his material has been published in around two hundred literary magazines since 1999, in U.K, U.S. and elsewhere. Recently in Poetry New Zealand and New Contrast (South Africa), Nimrod (U.S.).

RECURRING

You sense it’s the same
couple of swans flying over a row of trees,
you see them through the spots and specks
of the glass of a train window
at one with a sky of woolly clouds in the morning
regularly here in these days like the bell
that rings at school at the end of every hour
like a rain that merges with what you say.
There’s this daily spreading and pulsing of rhythms
and you stick to them, even to the one
that is a gnawing and throbbing of words
lingering in your mind after the umpteenth quarrel
over another final decision,
it all keeps a pace you feel on your skin
that stings like a physiognomy
with a taste you would prefer to avoid
but soon understand you can’t and maybe
don’t even really want to,
so the swans’ long necks and large wings beating
bearing and driving forward their white heavy bodies
are just the will that strives for permanence,
a gesture at once impressed on the tongue
and retina of things.


SUNBURN

A glow in your cheekbones you almost sense
spreading around, later, at dinner,
sitting by the evening surf.
You love being branded, initiated by sunlight
into the rawness of the salt,
all chinks filled with its luminous grit,
grabbed by the heart of the sky.
Its openness a blade
that makes it clear
all flesh is bared
and burnt in the end,
and is nothing but air.

But each burning is also a new start.
A new soil and shore.
After the whole day of silent rowing
when we had met for the first time
and measured our stares
with each oar’s stroke,
the nape of my neck carried a burn
that had bared my marrowbone.
And I felt scorched and vast in the evening light.



BROWN SHELL

You have spotted it, it’s solitary on the strand,
quite apart from the others and larger,
a sea badge with a thin froth of salt
on its arched lines, with all the lustre
of the sea skin.
Every time you find one you think it’s the last
but you keep on finding them, they are
spread on your desk which like them
is brown and glistens. Yes, it seems
it’s always waiting for more.
So you pick them up through the days
and feel chance becoming rhythm,
creating the world bit by bit,
the strokes sparse but relentless,
the light on the strand bewildered and bright.


FERRYING

Silently rounding the headland
you face
openness in a gust of wind,
a rush of blades on the pewter water,
a sunlit rippling, morning sharp,
you feel free and afraid,
everything can be torn apart
in the wilderness of the middle
crossing the line in the currents’ clash,
still no moorings in sight;
and you shiver
but also relish the strength
of this golden lapse
while the hilarious spray
spears away your features.


CALL FOR IT

1

You have just missed it, the dog’s glance,
the wind’s eye just passed after a touch.
Quick means clear. One second dream.
You either catch it or are lost to its flight.

The cat blinks, taps your gaze from afar,
taps lines in the air, pats their flickers;
look at the cat’s gaze: fully present, a sky
puzzled by its own immediacy, its hushed bloom.

Breathe the grains that shape this pantheon of gazes
around you, be ready for each speck, each dart,
each silent birth in the glances of the silvery dust.
The sound of one hand only is the heartiest gold

you can imagine, hear it as if you were reaching
the only one-in-a lifetime blossom in a field of grass,
the bright darkness of a sky, closer and closer, brushing
all over, like the pools of the horses’ eyes.


2

Do not pass unnoticed dear Hermes, in the meantime.
You, who like hiding in the child’s cradle, who slide through locks
like a mist. Wake us up for a blink in between your blinks.
Let us catch the word beyond the word when you talk

into ears, all aglow with the night, stuck with the resin,
stuck with smiles on the mercury line. In the meantime,
when the road runs with its score of stripes, the radio station
sings and talks and wheezes, the commercials break.

Do not stop keeping us awake, dear Hermes and dear Auden,
marking with lyre and drum what comes to pass
with the tiger-striped, unceasing swarming hum
of the roadways, along which your valves, our valves

close and open exactly, and our vessels at their right moment
contract and expand. Your forests have been razed to the ground
for a long time now, but we can still get a glimpse of a deer
that more shyly than then, peers through chinks into the debris.


3

Meet the stone, after the wave; meet the shot
of the sea’s eyes. Meet the stone, the instant stone
all aglitter; after flash and lash
infinitesimal stars  peer through.

One second sea. Call for it, all is ready.
You come to sudden clearing in the wood,
nobody’s there but the air, gazing. Mark
this vacancy, each of its dots with the marmot’s

still eyes when it stands and scrutinizes the openness, ready.
Listen to the ticking space in the grip of the sky’s blue,
it’s Pan’s pulse who stands waiting for the zenith,
the midday shadow straight into his body.

Look at the lemons in the orchard, the sun’s specks,
the pine needles in the wind’s stares,
Pan bides his time in a crack cut in the mouth of the light
and his breath sparks the horizon.