Poems by Davide Trame.

RAIN

It closes us in,
enwraps home, not unlike fog,
this tapping on window-sills,
this sloshing, showering, gurgling,
this curtain of busy needles.
We are maybe closer to each other
separated by it, under lamplight,
under the computer light,
casting reflections into the ether.

We were around a fire once
under a rock, telling tales
and casting spells.
The tapping filled the mouth of the cave.

I am not sure of what has changed.

WOUNDED

The wounded and defeated sea lion
after the fight with the other male,
wounded and alone and shuffling onward,
bleeding towards wherever he’s going
to bleed until the end, because the wounds
will fester and reach his marrow, the wounds
with the bitter core with a crust of sorrow,
wounds digging in like time’s roar.
Has he got anything more now to stand for?

I have been wounded, that’s for sure,
but I haven’t fought against any male,
how more evident and even brighter
my wounds would have been in that case
and how pure in contrast with these,
poisoned and invisible in the normal
haze of the day, washed in occasional
rhymes, on the world’s cacophonous strand,
my heart shuffling on and this poem my den.

"Be careful of the little bones"

Rabbit in tomato sauce, as a child
in front of a heaven of fields, in a kitchen
with the window on vineyards, granddad at lunch
with a glass of his own homemade wine.
Light red, full of summer sun.
Full of my gaze.
The past. What's gone.
Vivid because it can't be retrieved.
Except for sentences like this:
"Be careful of the little bones."
At lunch, all of us,
sucking and slurping to the sky,
it was from grandma I think I heard
the first time, these words to granddad,
words like breaths in the haze of time.

And now on an evening a few days ago,
a cousin I hadn't seen for ages
cooked rabbit... so "the little bones...
careful..."

Maybe the eternal present streams
in words like a mountain spring,
utterance is all.

And words
and "the little bones"
are the same thing.