Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Volume One November-December 2024
Crossings, i gessi della Croara, poems by Edward Caruso.
Crossings, i gessi della Croara
1
Exhaustion
will you spare me?
Silence at almost 5 am.
Visitations from dreams,
I’m averse to the cat
at my door,
scratching to enter.
Dawn across clicking gates,
if I’m awake,
gold coins found on a park bench,
a distant train’s passing,
glimpses that perforate morning.
Raindrops.
Elongated cypresses
beneath fading starlight.
I’m in transit.
2
Web cam images of this train
travelling at 300 km per hour.
Ploughed fields,
remote country houses,
horizons the fading line of haze.
MBAs in the next seat ply through screens:
• tables of ranked personnel;
• performance indicators.
Rows of vines sped past,
train wheel rhythms
my hi-hats, my drums.
Farmers, their absence
the slumber I bring
as I leave the city behind.
3
On arrival, pearl skies.
Creepers dangling off frayed bark,
branches the clasped hands
of twigs and gales,
bird droppings and drunk-
en fruits the quicksand
of intensifying sunlight.
To enter this place of worship,
ghost walks and dew,
valleys in shadow.
Take this soil
of mid-morning
sap and haunted oaks,
my bare feet
among pine cones and moss.
To this refuge
I return,
each arrival
as if the first.
Steep climbs
past common hornbeams.
Scorched fields of glare.
Night lines
1
Via Mascarella, 21.00
Crowds, motor cycles and cars block the road.
A silver-haired figure wanders into a group,
stumbles out, but is dragged back in.
Voices and orange light,
bedsheets dangling from a window ledge,
onlookers dancing to a tune at street level.
Drums;
guttural accents,
jazz and punk rhythms;
Africans and Sicilians,
dreadlocks, studs and nose rings
– two dealers chat up a bottle blonde
who’s tripping.
In front of San Petronio a choral mass,
onlookers outnumbered by clergy
backed by the choir’s unearthly chant.
A 19 bus arrives, from its rear seat
the centre a passing blur
of illuminated stone pillars.
More drums, but the sudden halt of the vehicle
and the whichever way its passengers
fall reminds me of a lottery
– numbers coming up.
2
Via Emilia, 23.00
Headlights and fireflies,
an African sex worker hums a lullaby,
dances ostrich style
by potato and maize fields.
Street lights curve into each other,
this a night of one German beer too many.
At times I hear my own breath;
at others the cars going by.
Even when meeting somebody new,
making that drive for the coast
and sleeping together onshore,
this is a city of endless wandering
and star-less skies.
Via Emilia,*
to Marcus Aemilius Scaurus,
foggy sunrises, imagined rain.
Street beneath my feet.
* The via Emilia, completed in 187 BCE, runs from Rimini to Piacenza, Italy, passing through Bologna. It is still in use today as a major road, and was named after the consul Marcus Aemilius Scaurus.
A handful of beans
In a crowded fruiterer’s
she asks for cooked carrots,
a handful of beans
(clutching and dropping several)
and for riper than ripe prunes.
After she leaves, a customer recounts
that the shopper had lost her husband
and had since lost her mind.
When she returns,
repeating her request for beans,
constant explanations
of looking for them in her bag
see her depart.
On the street, the bean lady asks where the baker,
who’s been closed for years, can be found.
At Infanzia Park, while leaning over a wooden table
and listening for busses, she asks me the time,
hoping to leave for a destination
she can’t recollect.
The strength of an afternoon breeze
stops her in mid-thought.
Busses come and go,
leaving her behind.
The newsagent phones the bean lady’s daughter,
who arrives,
double parking on a narrow street,
enticing her mother home, a third floor apartment
whose building has no lift.
I expect to see the bean lady at Belpoggio Park,
but the road is too steep.
Public spaces she occupied
and those the bean lady never would,
as if she were still among us.
© Edward Caruso
Edward Caruso has been published by A Voz Limpia, Australian Multilingual Writing Project, ‘La Bottega della Poesia’ (La Repubblica, Italy), Burrow, Communion, Kalliope X, Mediterranean Poetry, Meniscus, Melbourne Poets Union, n-Scribe, Right Now, P76, StylusLit, TEXT, Unusual Work and Well-Known Corners: Poetry on the Move. His second collection of poems, Blue Milonga, was published by Hybrid Publishers in 2019. In August of that year, he featured on 3CR’s Spoken Word program. In 2024 he co-judged the Ada Cambridge Poetry Prize.