Live Encounters Poetry & Writing August 2024
Fragments, poem by Edward Caruso.
Fragments
1
Autumn crueller than winter,
in a warm sun the iciest breath.
The loneliest leaf
parched in mud
reduced to fragments
paler than cement dust.
2
During an encounter of several minutes.
He pauses to call a girlfriend.
‘I can’t talk …
I have to leave you
for reasons I’ll explain.
We’ll always love each other.’
As he hangs up, ‘I’m sorry,’
my voice trails as I grip his hand.
‘No, that’s my lover,’ he replies.
‘This juncture is where I am.
Why I come back.’
3
Our worst moments
arise without awareness.
Days pass.
A tract where nothing grows
– sunlight on a stretch of parkland
covered in dew, a lone cigarette,
stubs in mud, worn outlines
of boot heels.
4
Nails in the trunk of a tree.
Such pain flowing out of me.
5
During an encounter of several minutes.
Bus stop: an elderly lady I’d joined had
no ticket, her remaining coins
bought my spare.
She remembered working in rice fields,
being transported to work in Romagna
and having to climb five flights of stairs
to her apartment.
The elderly woman tells two nearby commuters
who’d just appeared that she’d arrived after me.
Three hundred metres from our stop
a bus, defying a snap strike, comes to view.
6
Aldo Moro Park, by the River Savena.
In the canopy masses of pigeons,
midday breezes,
scattered seeds and leaves.
Sudden departure and return, shadows
of the flock gliding across lawns and treetops;
endless fluttering oblivious
to my copy of Pasolini’s Canzoniere,
it’s reading lost to the flight
and sudden silence.
7
Cemetery, San Lazzaro di Savena.
Stems, the more leaves they have
the less their roses drink.
Gardenias, adjacent tombs
decorated with our spares,
their deceased closer to us.
Weeping oaks and pines,
white skies.
The drive home, avenues
of ploughed farmland opposite
apartment blocks, rows of grapevines,
leaves receding to their autumnal residues,
colour of tilled soil.
Fields, clods of earth and treetops
covered in blood-red creepers.
Our departed, always with us,
each second of November.
8
The mists and gales in Fellini’s movies …
9
The deep red
of your blouse across
the bed.
Lay lie next to me
sky inside me
fingers tongue nipples
I’m inside you
fading light,
breath.
© 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, 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.