ALESSIO ZANELLI
Alessio Zanelli is an Italian poet who adopted English as his artistic language, widely published in anthologies and magazines, including California Quarterly, Italian Americana, Potomac Review, Poetic Voices, The Journal, Pulsar, Orbis and Poetry Monthly. He is also the author of two collections: Loose Sheets (UK, 2000; second edition 2002) and Small Press Verse & Poeticonjectures (USA, 2003), both available from major bookstores online. A bilingual 'selected poems' was published in January 2004 in Italy under the title 33 Poesie (33 Poems). As a visual artist (he once also loved to draw, paint and photograph), his most important attainment is the cover image of a recent issue of Poetry Review, Britain's leading poetry periodical. He lives in his hometown Cremona, in northern Italy, where he works as a private financial advisor.
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TO ONE WHO'D WANT TO CROSS THE THRESHOLD
Quiet. Be quiet or die. Let others
go-obliged. Withdraw your step and
stop, restrain your hand, return your
stare. Be quiet and look then fancy
your imago past the threshold,
but don't make a move! That's not a
task of yours, the where and how and
when. Whatever your intention
is-your creed or your desire. Just
see what has you live and know that
you must die before you're made to
know. That's how it goes, how Someone
gives and takes away, how governs
and continually creates. Be
quiet, be on your own, and hush, and
learn, and wait. There's time-this I can
state right now-on either side of
such alleged divide. So much, and
quite the same, indeed. Yet there can
be no prescience, gauge or figure.
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UPSIDE DOWN
What sort of world is ever that
where order and peace are made through soldiers
and tumult and war are made through pacifists?
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ABOUT PLACES
So many are the places that I've seen,
at first on books, a student, then on site,
a tourist; either works of nature or
of man: Hardanger Fjord, Grand Canyon, then
Stonehenge, the ruins of Rome. And even more
are those I'd love to visit still: the South Pole,
the Great Barrier Reef, then Troy, the Valley of
the Kings. I know I'll get to view but few
of all such places; too, what out of all
my doubts is mainly gnawing in my brain
is where it is I'll have to go, to which
resort I'll be appointed in the end.
I'll fly to Zion or cross the River Styx?
Of Gods, if blessed, which pantheon shall I see?
Of Dante's rings, if damned, which shall claim me?
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BUCOLIC AUSPICE
Where the canal terminates, like a cut-off
alien arm set down by magic on the neglected
soil, along obsolete fields of unripe maize and
vestigial rows of black mulberry trees, into
the upper country near the three-house village
of Tencara, when the sun is about to sink over
the fierce-colored mid-spring curtain-there I
can see the vortical dances of the evening
zephyr and hear the low-keyed moan of the
relenting ground. Together with magpies and
skylarks, daisies and buttercups. I can spot
myself in the desert range, as if a removed
spectator who spies from on high; detect the
background noise of my soul, interspersed
with the regular sound of my footsteps; listen
to my blue and rosy days, singing in a perfect
duet. This humbly-mighty land grant me the
privilege-once my run is over-of choosing
her as my own final fixed abode. May this
whole simplicity brace and escort me to the
grand finale, may this ordinary sky be my
reliable mate on my own twilight promenade
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THE ALTERNATIVE SIGHT
WHAT MEETS THE EYE DOES KILL TRUE KNOWLEDGE.
To see the sun as gentle warmth on the face;
to see the light as delicate itch on the skin.
To see the circumjacent everyday microcosm
as the touch, the noise, the taste and the smell
of skimmed, grasped, hit and trodden objects;
as the trail of each thing affixed to the air.
To see the all-encompassing macrocosm
as worded observations of the neighbors;
to work out their sight-endowed accounts
and attain more consistent descriptions.
To see the love from a loved one's eyes
as benign ceaseless tapping on the heart.
Quite such I strive to figure out
the born-blind people's perception.
How powerful and inscrutably wonderful!
How unparalleled must be the construct
of a non-visual-driven, unsullied mind!
So unfathomable to us-born with sight-
proves such a purely intellective thought!
For we are gifted with as prodigious organs
that we can hardly ever see the prodigy!
We see too much, and watch too little;
we sense too much, and feel too little.
I happened to cross a born-blind boy
walking arm in arm with his parents-
all I noticed was his atrophied eyeballs,
while beyond all doubt he did see me.