IVANO MUGNAINI

 

Human Art

 

We should love someone

who saw us tumble

ruinously from the stairs

without laughing, without trembling,

without hatred, without contempt,

without pity.

Knowing that it is normal,

it is human art

touching marble and granite

with our back. The spine,

treads the gap between matter

and nothingness, emptiness and fullness.

It doesn't matter how, after,

the body lays, the bones,

the posture.

What counts is the strength

to reconcile the flesh

and the thought,

yourself and the other,

the glass and the reflection,

chance, fate,

flight and fear.

 

The Hope Of September

 

Now that the ancient cues are gone

and the suitable ideas carefully noted down

have fallen one by one from iron stairs

without railing, now that even the heat

leaves room to the conscience of the evening,

it would be time to write only about time,

like a castaway who falls in love

with the water that strangles him

and abandons himself

with open eyes to an infinite embrace.

It would be time to hit the streets

of questions leaving the bags at home

looking for a voice, a key

in the broken bones of dogs or

in the soft meat of grinning harlots.

It would be time,

if time weren't fragile, imperfect,

regulated by badly calibrated chronographs,

subject to leaps and bounds, prides and terrors,

forced to do algebra of arithmetic,

getting the most elementary theorems wrong,

happy, after all, to fail the schemes,

the essentials, the calculations, the proportions,

happy, despite everything, to waste another

Summer pretending to study, to then return,

thirsty, vibrant, to the first day of school,

immutably, as long as there is hope

of September.

 

The Zero Degree

 

There comes a time when all that

remains is waiting, suspension,

the zero degree of life. It becomes a guilt,

then, even wiggling the awkward fingers

of hope, directing the heart towards

the idea of a clear, airy sky, a bite

of bread, a crumb, a residual sip

of wine.

   

But more guilty and more tenacious is

the ear, fixed on the wood of the door,

nailed, crucified, hung

at a heartbeat, an anxious touch,

uncertain, furtive: perhaps the thud,

the blind gait of fate;

perhaps the sincere warmth of a hand.

 

IVANO MUGNAINI

 

IVANO MUGNAINI: Born in Viareggio, he graduated in Pisa in Modern Languages with a thesis on the Renaissance theatre. He collaborates with publishers as editor and curator of critical notes and book reviews. He writes for magazines, both in print and online, including “New Prose”, “Gradiva”, “Grandevetro”, “Italian Poetry Review”, “Doppiozero”, “L'Immaginazione”.  He takes care of the literary blog “DEDALUS: literary texts and contexts”, where, in addition to his work, he publishes poems and prose of some of the most significant authors of the contemporary literary scene. He edited from 2000 to 2012, the headings “The shadow of the true” and “Congenial panorama” on the site of Bompiani RCS, www.bompiani.rcslibri.it/speakerscorner , in which he proposed some of his short stories and “interpretations” of films and literary classics. He presented his prose and poems in literary-artistic events and festivals including “Versinguerra” and “Poetic Bunker”, and literary passages combined with artistic works in the “Biennale” of Art in Venice. He has published the poetry books Inadequate to eternity, Time saved and The indocile clay, the collections of short stories The Yellow House and The Algebra of Life, the novels Honey of the Servants, Limbo and The blood of the dreams. His story Desaparecidos has been published by Marsilio and his tale Dawn by Marcos y Marcos. He recently wrote, both in Italian and English, the novel The mirror of Leonardo, whose protagonist is Leonardo da Vinci.

His site is: https://www.ivanomugnaini.it