Alda Merini
MEMORY

…Color impassions the poet.
It is his elementary jargon for becoming a child.
Perhaps it is his cant’s root
and likewise the painter seeks befitting words
to give to the outpouring, the cascade of his brush
a limit that is of harmonious words.
The poet is painter, sculptor, musician, inventor and at times, architect.
When they call me – great poet – they do nothing but clip my wing,
because I would also wish to paint and outstretch my arms so as to discover
impossible loves, earthy loves.
And of earth is Wanda’s harmonious song made of.
A sublime soul foreshortening, perhaps an infinite word… who knows…
Poets have their own mysteries, like painters, and they will never tell us.
They will never talk because they began to paint and then maybe,
to destroy all that they had done.
Because the artist is forever at war.
And no one knows that the artist is the first to drown his very own life
in many, oh so many, things which could even be tears…
and we will never find out. And the painter and the poet will never tell us.
Art is a push forward or to the bottom?…