So many on my mother’s face,
it’s the age pattern I see
when she stumbles unworried bending forward
and comes close, to talk to me,
I see the skin map with its own shine
and its net of tracks and old suns,
the roots where I have slept and run.
She talks, river gurgling on pebbles,
and quietly invades me with her trimming
continents where I feel cradled
in the echoes that have made me.
I wallow in the world
I’ve always known
up to the present, with its lace
of newness, its thin outlines,
the apple tree leaves, just sprouted,
and the latest furrows in the garden,
this latest stare in which we stand.

And I gaze at your eyes now
as you sit, tired, on the train,
they swim in the landscape outside,
a billowing quilt, their tune.
I gaze at your eyes, and at the hedgerows
lining in the train’s roar
the present of the day.
And under your eyes
the thin light-grey lines, like hair,
pigeons’ feet, nettles in watercolour,
or a web of bare branches the horizon leaves,
they have grown, I know, after you cried silently
and they are the marks of the aftermath
of my words, my carving through.
Clear wisps of pain.
And we cannot now but stay in them.
They have become
our inescapable bearings.
The present’s naked blade.
While the train crosses the bridge
in a clamour of waves
and meets spring in swords of sunlit flowers.

About the Author

Davide Trame

Davide Trame is an Italian teacher of English. Davide has been writing exclusively in English since 1993. His poems have appeared in magazines since 1999. Trame’s poetry collection “Re-emerging” was published by www.gattopublishing.com in 2006.