Fragment to Death

I come to you and return to you,
sentiment born of light, of heat,
baptized when the beginning was joy,
recognized in Pier Paolo
at the origin of a craving epopeia:
I have walked in the light of history,
but, my being was always heroic
under your dominion, intimate thought.
Every real act of the world, of history,
coagulated in the stream of light,
in the atrocious distrust of your flame:
and it was wholly verified within it,
losing its life in order to regain it:
and life was real only if beautiful ...

The fury of confession first,
then the fury of clarity:
it was from you that it was born,
hypocrite, obscure sentiment! And now,
let them accuse my every passion,
let them sling mud, call me deformed, impure,
obsessed, amateur, perjurer:
you isolate me, you give me the certainty of life:
I am in the pyre, I play the card of fire,
and I win, this little immense good
I have, I win this infinite,
miserable compassion of mine
that makes even righteous ire my friend:
I can do so, because I have suffered you so!

I return to you, like an emigrant
returns to his country and re-discovers it:
I have done well (with my intellect)
and I am happy, just like
I used to be, destitute as always.
A black rage of poetry in my chest.
A crazy young man’s old age.
Once your joy was confused
with terror, it’s true, and now
almost with other joy,
livid, arid: my disappointed passion.
You really frighten me now,
because you are really close, included
in my state of rage, of obscure
fame, in the anxiety of a newly born creature.

I am sane, if you like,
the neurosis branches out beside me,
exhaustion desiccates me, but
it does not have me: at my side
the last light of youth laughs.
At this point, I have had all that I wanted:
I have actually even gone beyond
certain hopes the world had: emptied,
there you are, inside of me,
filling my time and all times.
I have been rational and I have been
irrational: to the very end.
And now ... ah, the desert deafened
by the wind, the stupendous and other-worldly
sun of Africa that illuminates the world.

Africa! My one and only
alternative ...........................................
.............................................................

(1960)