https://salvatorealasite.wordpress.com/2024/01/09/venice-2023/
Month: January 2024
The Saturation of Eternity
Red like the sun bleeding
Green like leaves born of nothingness
Blue like the inside of light
Spilling over the sky
And yellow
Doomed by black to shine with rot
And black
Like a massacre of accountants
And white
Like its own crucifix on a vast wall
Nicolino Locche
(September 2, 1939 – September 7, 2005)
Punch a ghost
And you fall through an abyss.
Jab repeatedly at a shadow
And you beat your own brains
Against nothingness.
Throw your hardest left and miss
Stumbling through your momentum
Like a puppet come unstrung
To miss again with your right
Until it seems
You’re in a self-defeating fight.
That was the genius of Nicolino Locche,
“The untouchable one.”
He fought by not fighting
And even losing, he won.
Then the People Rejoiced
Dec 11, 2023
Pavoletti’s overhead goal
To win against Sassuolo
Was a miracle of the spherical
Identical to the chimerical.
Not just for Luvumbo’s chip
In desperation of dying time,
Not even for the finish,
But for the ball headed back
To Pavoletti by Shomurodov.
Rarely is such a perfect question
Asked of life
As that parabola of a pass
Mesmerizing everyone
Like a moon above statues,
Except for Pavoletti
Who had the answer.
Then the people rejoiced
And some wept openly
As though witness to a minor miracle.
Save by Stefano Turati vs Sassuolo
September 17, 2023
It wasn’t a save as much as phenomenon.
At the goal line of credulity
The keeper clawed the ball out of reality.
A save saving at the point of being being,
Astonishment bounced out of the ball
And struck all who saw it– with astonishment.
On the Magic of Lionel Messi
Watching Lionel play football
Was to see a master magician
Sharing his amazement
At escaping from all the locks
And seeing himself emerge
From impossible mazes,
Switching the ball at his feet
For the ball in the goal
Without mirrors or strings,
Creating the illusion
Of levitating a stadium,
Leaving defenders dazed
As though by Hermes,
Goalkeepers naked as Adam,
The net rippling with startled doves.
Rilke’s Roses, Duino Castle
It wasn’t until the flower garden
When I felt the presence of the poet.
In that rarefied air high above the Adriatic
I thought of the roses as incarnations
Of the souls of poems
He’d only imagined or half-created
In the garden of creation’s greater half,
Waiting for a breath of wind to bloom
And to drop their petals on those who dream.
Venice, 2023
Water climbs steps, stone softens,
People are aquatic and lyrical,
Time is steeped in glass,
Shapes of dreams and light
Wash away and are restored.
Beside her nursling waves
Every hour adds an hour.
On vaporetti, being vanishes.
We are as the mist
And out of mist we appear,
The palaces seem imagined,
The Grand Canal bends time
And the domes of San Marco
Complete the witchcraft of the waves.
From the conservatory
Cellos navigate canals,
Pianos touch keys of water,
From open windows voices glide
As though on seraphic wings.
In a piazza, a ball rebounding,
Echoes its flight
Above the children playing.
Otherwise the city is silent.
Lapping waves, church bells
Melting over the waters,
Boats absorbed by space
And the currents in their wake,
And the deeper you go
Into the lanes of the city,
Andare per le fodere,
The quieter the city seems
Until by a mirror-like canal
Silence flowers from its fabric.
In the floating city
Sleep is pledged to dream.
The elements combine
Like elixirs of well-being,
Elixirs of love.
Salvatore Ala 