You laugh at me, flaying myself for words, bending around me in the straining elms, the blue edge of skies and hills and quivering waters’ voices, wiling my youth with clouds and hues the light submerges.
I know you. Waylost in you beauty lifts your breasts, scoops to your hips and in gentle sweep spreads over you shy sex, flows down in harmony of forms to the ten shells of your lovely feet.
But wait; if i take you, you too become word to me, and sadness.
This is one of the best poems I ever read. Better: one of my favourite poems.
So sensual and so sad both. Almost densperated. That “I know you” (Ti so in the original Italian version) bring us into a deep intimacy and meantime into an immense sadness.
Those two last lines are almost unberable and filled with a so great pain… Well, rereading it in these so strange days makes me understand better the poet and feel a sharp melancholy.
Original version (Italian)
Parola
Tu ridi che per sillabe mi scarno e curvo cieli e colli, azzurra siepe a me d’intorno, e stomir d’olmi e voci d’acque trepide; che giovinezza inganno con nuvole e colori che la luce sprofonda.
Ti so. In te tutta smarrita alza bellezza i seni, s’incava ai lombi e in soave moto s’allarga per il pube timoroso, e ridiscende in armonia di forme ai piedi belli con dieci conchiglie.
Ma se ti prendo, ecco: parola tu pure mi sei e tristezza.
I feel softness and urge takes my chest, need to see your skin and to touch you without fabric in between; dismay into your gloomy eyes could calm down
I still crave love from you and your flesh even modest I want lead to tense up to a powerful shiver; your hands come onto me, to frisk me everywhere
I am yours. Without veils I await you, your lips cover through all the body I give you. You drive me to that spasm I yearn for, so maybe anguish breaks
My breast gives itself to you as well my mouth and my round navel and my narrow hole that makes female your wife. You fill sweetness with love
We came to our evening, yet I want you as when I gave myself to you first time and we were really one: body, soul, eyes and I was twenty
My first embrace was clumsy because inexpert, we discovered flesh. Our life then mutated its course. Bring me to God again: I love you
Give me peace, restore me again, more; I’m more wrinkled respect at that time but expert. Love gasp takes me indeed; You give me only each thing and we
Light and air made you as a cute sylph,
golden matter and diaphanous too
warmth to hug to not sense to be alone.
Trying to love sometimes seems to hug ghosts
There’s a knot between right and left side There’s a knot bounding your light thin silk There’s a knot hiding shy female things where your body becomes left or right
Into a knot there are sweet secret things that knot makes walk and dream my poor mind so I feel weak and silly my heart. There’s a knot before intimacy
I need places to rest, putting face
in safe soft friendly warm alive place
as a child, as a pet looking for
a nice and pleasant shelter to sleep
I perceive a knot into my flesh rooted there, where I need love and breaths, a knot rooted so much into me to force my soul to think sinful thoughts
I’ve a knot deeply into my deep I see a knot hiding shivers of love I’m a knot between heaven and hells Solve that knot, let me walk on safe ways
Light and air made you as a cute sylph,
gentle matter and diaphanous too
warmth to hug to not sense to be alone.
Dreaming love sometimes is as hug ghosts
Well: this is Wish 2, (very!) less serious than the previous one. It’s only a play, a joke. Is it?. Please, refer to the pic to fully understand its title. LOL.
I wish to be wish as a witch you can catch in a wood, near that birch which loves a hard, tall beech while we can see a bitch going fast to a beach
I’m emotions and skin, I’m an itch and my body wants twitch among your hands: bewitch me.
My flesh is like a glitch as an old broken kitsch. Take me, fill my deep niche: I want feel that sweet stitch.
As I told in my main Italian blog, Terry built a very interesting and moving art installation in Second Life: Rain. It is dedicated to her mom and shows us something about Terry’s memories and thoughts about her and her death.
If you are interested to know more about Rain, see this post by Inara Pey. Here I underline only that a previous Terry’s similar work, Empty chairs, started considering the death of Terry’s dad yet after it went on applying feelings and extending considerations, emotions and sensations more widely, on the theme of the absence itself.
This machinima is much more complex than it seems. It is beautiful, up to make shiver.
Kristine perverted the white or coloured Terry’s flowers to crimson, blood ones, and turns on herself in a tiny space drawn by a column of light. Nothing around it.
She shook up those pale yet somehow gentle flowers made by Terry, those flowers that after their so pale and cold beginning in Terry’s work get beautiful colours, as hopes have. Here those flowers are too much big, too much red, too much upsetting.
Here those flowers aren’t a landscape but only a narrow scene in which Kristine and only Kristine dances her pain. She’s alone, even without memories: that’s the absence.
This is a strong and hard reflection about herself, filled with that obsessive crimson: blood and rose, rose petals becoming blood, her bloodlike coloured dress (she always is black dressed in her machinimas) and those so upsetting blood flowers. There’s a bad red scar on her face.
Terry with her work told us something about her blood: her mother. Kristine keeps her eyes on her pain due to the absence, as a monster detail and everything becomes a real blood flow.
If you pay attention, at time 2:47, there is a voice citation from Mulholland Drive, where the anchor-man (a terrifying one) on the stage of a theatre says “It is an illusion”. Of course, this consideration could change definitively the meaning of the whole machinima, as to say “Well, I’m only joking”. Really, in my opinion, it is not so: Kristine tells us that also pain can be something like play, acting, a recital: in such cases we live in a so little and perverted space and we can only feel pain.
Yes: this is pain. Yet, please, we must not be defined only by it.
Another prompt: if that absence were truly absence of sense for our way, work, moving, living?
Gorgeous girl as a fresh spring pure breeze near me dances and bounces so that I’m upset, I am puzzled, aroused as a morning ground waiting for rain
You are a sylph made with gentle sweet breath nature’s strength, pure essence yet a woman please embrace me, hug me as a cloud so I’ll be less dark and sad, heavy, bad
Wrap your skin around me, feel my one do protect my soul from nasty thoughts see how much I need sweet honey things, see how much I am only desire.
Then my reason gets control again and I feel myself silly, dumb, poor as if I hadn’t seen my soul safe. Thank you sweet gorgeous girl, anyway
If you set out in this world, better be born seven times. Once, in a house on fire, once, in a freezing flood, once, in a wild madhouse, once, in a field of ripe wheat, once, in an empty cloister, and once among pigs in sty. Six babes crying, not enough: you yourself must be the seventh.
When you must fight to survive, let your enemy see seven. One, away from work on Sunday, one, starting his work on Monday, one, who teaches without payment, one, who learned to swim by drowning, one, who is the seed of a forest, and one, whom wild forefathers protect, but all their tricks are not enough: you yourself must be the seventh.
If you want to find a woman, let seven men go for her. One, who gives heart for words, one, who takes care of himself, one, who claims to be a dreamer, one, who through her skirt can feel her, one, who knows the hooks and snaps, one, who steps upon her scarf: let them buzz like flies around her. You yourself must be the seventh.
If you write and can afford it, let seven men write your poem. One, who builds a marble village, one, who was born in his sleep, one, who charts the sky and knows it, one, whom words call by his name, one, who perfected his soul, one, who dissects living rats. Two are brave and four are wise; You yourself must be the seventh.
And if all went as was written, you will die for seven men. One, who is rocked and suckled, one, who grabs a hard young breast, one, who throws down empty dishes, one, who helps the poor win; one, who worked till he goes to pieces, one, who just stares at the moon. The world will be your tombstone: you yourself must be the seventh.
József Attila
Original version (Hungarian)
A hetedik
E világon ha ütsz tanyát, hétszer szűljön meg az anyád! Egyszer szűljön égő házban, egyszer jeges áradásban, egyszer bolondok házában, egyszer hajló, szép búzában, egyszer kongó kolostorban, egyszer disznók közt az ólban. Fölsír a hat, de mire mégy? A hetedik te magad légy!
Ellenség ha elődbe áll, hét legyen, kit előtalál. Egy, ki kezdi szabad napját, egy, ki végzi szolgálatját, egy, ki népet ingyen oktat, egy, kit úszni vízbe dobtak, egy, ki magva erdőségnek, egy, kit őse bőgve védett, csellel, gánccsal mind nem elég, – a hetedik te magad légy!
Szerető után ha járnál, hét legyen, ki lány után jár. Egy, ki szivet ad szaváért, egy, ki megfizet magáért, egy, ki a merengőt adja, egy, ki a szoknyát kutatja, egy, ki tudja, hol a kapocs, egy, ki kendőcskére tapos, – dongják körül, mint húst a légy! A hetedik te magad légy.
Ha költenél s van rá költség, azt a verset heten költsék. Egy, ki márványból rak falut, egy, ki mikor szűlték, aludt, egy, ki eget mér és bólint, egy, kit a szó nevén szólít, egy, ki lelkét üti nyélbe, egy, ki patkányt boncol élve. Kettő vitéz és tudós négy, – a hetedik te magad légy.
S ha mindez volt, ahogy írva, hét emberként szállj a sírba. Egy, kit tejes kebel ringat, egy, ki kemény mell után kap, egy, ki elvet üres edényt, egy, ki győzni segít szegényt, egy, ki dolgozik bomolva, egy, aki csak néz a Holdra: Világ sírköve alatt mégy! A hetedik te magad légy.
My friend Sharrow told me that she sees relationships between my stuff “Wish” and this poem by J.Attila; she also proposed me a different translation of the last verse of each stanza: “You to be the seventh, yourself!”; really I like more her versione.
She also shared me a song using Attila’s poem as lyric, this one.
I think this interesting Hungarian poet should be better known!
When the night quickly comes like a ghost, a dark velvet or silence, old veil often bringing us pain memories … I wish to be your wish and desire
When the moon rises so large and white like a girl in love yet pure and chaste and we feel to be such a poor thing … I too wish to be wish and desire
When my purple spreads through all my neck and my cheeks and elsewhere too there where you want to touch my shy skin … I must be your wish and your desire
When the fog deletes trees and each thing in this world and we are like blind cats without home, with no sense and no hope … I want to be your wish and desire
When the death strikes so hard just near us stealing from us what we need so much and I shiver with fear and with cold … I need to be your wish and desire
January, 1st 2022
My dear friend Terry made this beautiful photo after she read my words:
Give me reward again in the night when it’s dark and I hug you and my skin waits for you like a poor parched pool to find peace at least for only an instant
Making love, tremors fill all my flesh shaking it in my chest, belly and everywhere. So, I burn, sacrifice to that life really mattering, true
Give me you, all you and not just some: give me your hands and mouth. Your mind be with me only one, only substance to show that I can truly exist
Take me quite as I am, take my evil and the good which I can: it’s so little. I am as a well, hole, a basin, pool restless and edgy shorn of its fullness
Give me your eyes and thus let me see where you look at the end of each thing, there where all starts and all can begin, there where lives God who made us alive
Let I can grow again and hold up this my body and my spirit, tired after years of great sloth and great pride.
(Thank you to my friend Terrygold for the last beautiful landscape she built in Second Life. This winter land remembers me a trip I did many years ago to a place in my Alps, Lago Nero – Black Lake. Soon I’ll post the sources of these words on my Italian Blog; they are very symple words that you can easily understand simply using the Google translator)
Frozen landscape tells me ice and snow, speaks to me of past times and old stories about young girls and boys just grown up where all my time was hereafter and further
White nice splendour of silence and peace it remembers me that day, now far, when I went to the black lake and its ice surface began to break in spring
Like the blood of red poppies among fields of wheat my days bloomed and brief is their time. Cover, snow, my old stuff! Because life is a so little thing
White cold peace in the countryside, here, when time stood still as did in that day. My mind is young again, even now my skin withers yet expects still love
The skin of the angels 
