Terry’s Empty chairs

My friend Terry made into Second Life this art installation, where as usual she is her model. It moved me, especially for the sweet sadness and the melancholy of all the installation, that looks at something no more (or not yet?) there.

After I wrote my text, I knew that Terry dedicated her installation to her dad.

(to Terry with affection)

White smooth skin, baked clay,                   
modest and statuesque, you wear
only crimson nail polish.
A mask always occludes your mouth

No words and no caresses,
no kiss can warm your lips
sealed in stunned stasis.
Each thing is only silence of absence

You’re alone, wandering empty rooms,
with no friends, mates, companions around.
Antique pink on the walls contrasts with
your so pale, delicate, marble flower

Black frames say deep dark space:
they tell it as thick, worrying
empty sockets that lost any memories
about who lived there, into their picture

You do live a green dream, colours and
gentle birds hovering in the air
like a breeze thickening nice presences,
chirps that are given to joyful love

Then a spectrum of empty prospects,
lifeless too, follows the garden where
there are colours and light and birds, joy:
follows it, closes it with stress, anguish

Benches sit down inside a dark park
and so many chairs stacked or spread
through the empty night streets, waiting for,
without one who enjoys or lives them

Like those chairs, an alone empty Vespa.
You watch it, maybe thinking of someone
dead, not here, maybe a friend that taught you
to fish,
when you were only a child

A strange feeling makes turgid my breasts
as I look at your so gorgeous body
I’m lame and very small and I feel
your skin close to me and it’s ice cold

SL, Osta Nimosa, August, 24th 2021

Italian version