Online Exclusive

12.19.03
From A Story
The man is in the backyard, quoting to the stars a secret
only his heart knows, smiling at the moon first, and then 
at the hologram re-created in his brain by love, novelty 
reflecting his solid will against ancient doubts reduced 
to a sigh, soon forgotten in the new heat of dedication: 

the reward of patience is only patience, not a recompense 
for enduring a past uneventful life, webs of silence, empty 
beds, and now the distance shared in the night by a mute 
companion. Her precise yearning is consubstantial to his 
own—same wilful gaze directed to a full moon from over 

the fence of the continent to the east-Mediterranean sea
and Atlantic ocean surging as a plain looking-glass for our
characters. They’re tormented by a hunger whose ripeness
hits hard as the fruit dropped on the ground by a branch
carrying too much, even for a lifetime of lack and errors

to be redeemed in resolve and passion. Despondence would
be a natural response for such a predicament, experienced
by so many: lonely, unsatisfied creatures whose words have
no weight, we ask for more than a surrender or compromise
with a common truth of destiny and dissolution. But to go on

with the story let’s forget the tendency to irresolution or vain
philosophy when emotions surge like a wave, threatening
to drown us in the incapacity for acceptance and genuine
love, not dangerous but other, thus worth inquiring into.
The man tonight is alone in the backyard, and if no moon

can alleviate his solitude in the growth to maturity and light,
he knows that watching it as they do from opposite shores
is the blessing for months to come, the one remembrance
of the compass and microcosm of old, shown as symbols
of the worthy lovers surviving separation and loss of pride.

Yet the man, born in a life of reflections and acquiescence
to adversity, is tired of strength and trials, wants to rebel
and scream like a child furious with his mother because
she didn’t anticipate his disobedience, avoiding with her
wisdom his getting into troubles. Old age and knowledge

of humanity are not always wiser than innocence and truth,
or youth, as in a world of fact we choose sometimes the only
thing we want because we saw it in a dream that makes us
wake into our true life and jump in the dark, optimism just
a euphemism for what we feel all of a sudden, eyes open

on a future we had renounced a long time ago. The man,
still there looking upward, stubborn in his choice and wish,
is one that understood the power to enchant that solitude
and disillusion give to profound eyes and calmly anchored
souls, scant as the alternatives may be to the written fate

of incurable dreamers. He knew by heart what somebody
wisely said in a not distant past: all we are not stares back
at what we are
, second law of this jungle, as the first was
erased in blood ages ago. No shame, no resignation for
the lonely man quietly stalking happiness in deciding he

wants to have and love only the carnal ghost evoked one day
by the magic of words through air, with the peculiar feeling
of shedding dried-up skin and a world of habits for a sudden
plunge into the novelty of being crazy instead of wise and slow.
Same behavior of the still secret unwise companion this story

has not defined as yet, being embedded for the moment only
in the first maddening chapter of a long incipit (post-prologue
if you will): fact is, we’re frozen at the first scene in a moonlit
backyard, still observing the face that watches through steady
but passionate eyes the dark blue sky full of silent promise.



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