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| Leo Fusca |
DEATH
Translated by Laura Chalar
Every man carries inside him a ripe death.
Sometimes it’s small and can be painted
green.
In others it has the same
size as the body and creaks with each step as if it walked
on crutches.
But there is someone on whom death can be smelled
at a distance, like the mills’
honey in the time of grinding:
it fills his actions, senses, love, glory,
hatred or impotence.
Death is the house where he lives
and it’s seen from afar, made out from the road,
heard with the rumor of a cloak in the smile
or of a winding-sheet in the exultant word.
The only thing that one owns is the past.
Sometimes years, other times short whiles, minutes maybe.
An instant can be the whole past.
And it’s before the man. To him it reaches out,
to him it runs. What is sought,
actually, is not the future but the meeting.
And the finding is nothing but returning oneself
to what has been dreamed, just as the word
is sought to find it in the objects
or memory in the flyleaves of a book
open like life.
Sometimes it’s small and can be painted
green.
In others it has the same
size as the body and creaks with each step as if it walked
on crutches.
But there is someone on whom death can be smelled
at a distance, like the mills’
honey in the time of grinding:
it fills his actions, senses, love, glory,
hatred or impotence.
Death is the house where he lives
and it’s seen from afar, made out from the road,
heard with the rumor of a cloak in the smile
or of a winding-sheet in the exultant word.
The only thing that one owns is the past.
Sometimes years, other times short whiles, minutes maybe.
An instant can be the whole past.
And it’s before the man. To him it reaches out,
to him it runs. What is sought,
actually, is not the future but the meeting.
And the finding is nothing but returning oneself
to what has been dreamed, just as the word
is sought to find it in the objects
or memory in the flyleaves of a book
open like life.
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