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Every poem has a single theme:
How the word says something else.
The sparrow hawk lives blind and serene
In the murk of the final words.
I walked on these streets in the years
When my youth was a dead she-wolf,
But they were unreal, not drawn out
Yet, or drawn out and entombed.

They watched me with painted eyes
Or from photos incandescent
Those streets today blurry, clear,
At the same time narrow and precise:
They are in the past and today I cross them,
In a sheet draped, chasing myself.
Everything is a pact of irreality:
The serenade of the rosebush of time.
I will see myself unfolded, on turning this corner
As in the Rinascente department store
One afternoon in Turin made of plaster
In the dark grisaille of the porticoes.
(Then I remembered it was carnival,
Seeing lights in the February snow.)
Hunters of the hunter,
We crouch, loggia to loggia, corner
To corner, mercury zigzag
That slips through my hands, my years.
Like a gargoyle in the Piazza Solferino,
The mask of my yesterday looks at me.
To have reached the end of the road:
The moon could linger in the end.
The poem, a mosaic of voices:
All poems are a single voice
That murmurs words wearing makeup,
The smeared eyeshadow in the voiceless light,
The wave that arriving departs.
The predella of Urbino is the shuttering
Word of Paolo Uccello:
Shadows of quicksilver, incensing light
In the muzzle of air in flames.
But the predella is not a rampart;
The heirloom’s absolute word,
The waxen gloss of clarity.