1
When spring came for us buried in the walls
of a seventeenth century building,
it was not a light at first but a voice from high up,
the shuffling of a ray's throat, a piano key
tumbling on the ledges, a tingling breath
among some unreachable gossamer
on the rafters of the ceiling.
There where rats had woken us fidgeting
in the nights of their avenues, there
where I tried to bury them up hammering
a thick square board, one more layer
with a shine in the nails' soul.
When spring came with all its stirrings in tow
then, at last, it was a light, the clearer call of a gaze
on a niche in our wall, that single niche
where we kept a red candle, a clearer call it was
spreading a tongue of mellow cobalt and lilac
on the white floor. A whiteness
I stubbornly scrubbed to allure the sky's threshold.
When spring came I remember a string
of voices from the calle announcing it,
chords strewing on a row of eyelashes
wishing geraniums' veins tumble on window-sills,
scratching the greenness of our shutters' frames,
sliding over the lamp hanging low and perpetually
lit on our oval table, and reaching the kitchen-corner
where it ticked in a glitter on the comma-shaped
umpteenth orange millipede fallen in a glass.

2
A first floor, the stretch of a large river-bed
with its smoothed-down, rose black and brown
universe of pebbles which gathers the twitching veins,
like on a horse's flank, from foundations sunk
in a sun-speckled, nether water and mud horizon.
A first floor, the central hall of a palace
that was my secondary school, a crossroads
I crowded with others, with hectic pacing
in between the morning's feverish chinks.
After a flight of stairs, here, on the right
you passed by the massive ebony table,
your signpost, the janitor's realm, she
sturdy and alert, a hearty Charon
before your daily trial of being tested.
And on both sides the balconies, one giving on
into the green swell of a garden where
our gazes buzzed with expectations through the leaves,
the other to the canal, boat engines threading
on the window-panes the skittering of their veins.
I, in the clamour, threading the unknown
ball of days.
Clamour, what memory now gives back,
the to and fro of voices, rustling papers, steps,
the fear of results running on the corridors in gossip-gusts,
the future's fingers fumbling.
Now I have just run up here in a rush
after reading a sign at the door saying
the building is a squat. Unbelievable.
The blue light from the clear dusk
strikes the floor through a broken window
like a perfect arrow. I just stand.
The floor is dirty, the space looks narrow
but the sky plunges in with a warm
summer evening Tiepolo swirl
and glad ghosts merge with the outside
clamour of children,
on foundations imbued with the eternity
of boats mooring in roaring light.

Davide Trame is an Italian teacher of English, born and living in Venice-Italy, writing poems exclusively in English since 1993, they have been published in U.K, U.S. and elsewhere. His poetry collection, Re-Emerging, was published as an on-line book by www.gattopublishing.com  in 2006.