Rijeka: the city that flows.

 

Forgotten on the shores of the multiple past. Border city. Ghost city. Rijeka is deployed on the Kvarner Bay overseeing the dark blue Adriatic see. In the streets languages. In the languages nostalgia. The windows remain mysterious as it is our dwelling. Rijeka is a sad city. Phantom city. There are some hidden angles where silence whispers, where I try to say but I cannot find the words, where I try to find meaning in the palimpsests of the past: Austrian and Hungarian, Italian, Yugoslavian, Croatian. Does it matter now? All those layers are melting down underneath my steps. The city embraces my solitude. It opens to the abyss of the remembering. Boats leave. Boats come. As love. As humans. They share secrets, they bring new sadness. Grey and odd yellow lights. Overheated stones. Fermenting artists trying to make it, to figure out a path through the multifaceted urban map. Languages spread on places. Places spread across feelings.

Rijeka is a city of borders, city of ports, avid and selfish, often generous and wise, Rijeka is a city of silence and void, sometimes endless, just as our vital silence is.

Rijeka is a city where I can walk endlessly without any particular scope. I can lose myself and find myself. Discover wild beaches, devastated shores, edges, borderlines, littorals. Lines of belonging. Lines of oblivion.

Waves of nostalgia are invading my motion. There is no distinct pleasure to discover. No clear surroundings. Lines of non belonging. Lines of presence. Broken infrastructures, Broken structures. Broken. Fluid and blurred. Shifting and melting. Rijeka is a fluid city. A tectonic city. City that flows across layers of nostalgia and desire.

 

Triste Trieste . Fine Confine.

Questa città rappresenta per me un nucleo emotivo molto forte: preponderante avvolgente travolgente. Il mio primo incontro con il mondo occidentale. Con il capitalismo. 1999. Primo viaggio in Italia. Prima Italia. Primo contatto con il gusto del capitalismo. Con la vasta ricreazione dell’infinito. Il Faro della Vittoria che splende appariscente sopra il baratro livido dell’Adriatico. Il luminoso Castello di Miramare che abbraccia sensualmente il bosco della penombra dell’immaginazione.

Dopo un volo della JAT via Belgrado, dopo una notte insonne nell’Hotel Slavia in una Belgrado tormentata dai bombardamenti della NATO, arrivo al Ronchi dei Legionari e mi attende il poeta Umberto Mangani amico che conosceco sin dal Festival di Poesia di Struga. Mi porta al Café Tommaseo a prendere un aperitivo. Per me senza precedenti. Vengo da una cultura socialista scarsa, povera. Non conosco l’abbondanza e la generosità dell’edonismo. Nemmeno la lussuria. Trieste mi accoglie nelle sue onde di frontiera. Italiana. Yugoslava. Austro-ungherese. Unica.

Ogni mattina si va a Duino nella spiaggia sotto il castello id Rilke. Con Marta e Umberto e con i panini che la mamma di Umberto ci faceva. Si ascolta Paolo Conte nei baratri luminosi del carso. Si mangia in Osmiza. Si vive la leggerezza e la spensieratezza. Una città vecchia. Immobile. Elegante. Distinta. Calma. Malgrado la bora molta calma. Si sorseggia l’Aperol-Spritz ai baretti verdi della Barcola. Barcola. Quello spazio infinito di corpi sdraiati al sole di seno libero al sole di donne felici nella loro solitudine di signori immersi nelle loro letture di calamari fritti di onde selvagge che mordono la pietra del confine randaggio. La Barcola. Strana. Ostile. Avara. Stupenda.

Città di mare e di porto. Città di confine e di conflitto. Amara e severa. Immersa nella poesia di Saba. Echeggiante nella letteratura di Joyce. Indefinibile. Ineffabile. Spruzzata da mari remoti. Invasa da poesie irrequiete. Questa città si ama. E si cela il perche si ama.

Amo Trieste perché mi ricorda la mia infanzia. Mi ricorda quando i miei nonni portavano varie cose dall’Italia e mi portavano il gusto di un mondo ignoto. Amo Trieste perché per me rappresenta la poesia dell’esistenza. Il primo legame con l’italia. Un sole lucido che avvolge tutto il Miramare. Bella nella solitudine di un canto lontano. Questa città si ama. E si cela il perche si ama.

Dal bar di James Joyce dal Ponterosso, vi abbraccio

Natty

Solitudine

“Ci sono dei momenti in cui la vita è aperta come un ventaglio, ci si vede tutto, e allora è fragile, insicura e troppo vasta.”

Pier Paolo Pasolini

 

Una onda scoppia nelle narici, si espande sulla testa, diffusa la luce del sole, soffice la sabbia, il vento tenero, la pelle contra il vuoto scottante, i piedi appesi e sospesi, in una notte sfusa e confusa, sparsa e persa, gli occhi, umidi, ti cercano nella solitudine.

Nel vuoto ontologico dell’Essere dove tutto sembra liquido, senza senso, grande, immenso, da far paura – Il mare fa paura! – si affronta l’ignoto, l’infinito “ermo colle”, oltre la linea, si schiaccia l’insostenibile linea della esistenza, si mette a fuoco tutto, è tutto è nulla, nessuno, e niente, le scelte felici della gente felice. Una tana sospesa sopra le nuvole, dove tutto è radioso, splendido, vasto, dove si questionano tutte le scelte condizionate, invane, quelle della gente felice, dove ci si aggrappa all’attesa della luce, ci si perde nella matura riflessione negli occhi, in un soffio, in un canto chiaro, sempre: il poeta, il filosofo parte, si ritira, è triste, muto e quello che ci accomuna è la forza di amare la solitudine, il silenzio.

La scelta di tacere per non mentire.

La riflessione propria nello specchio effervescente del mare in silenzio.

 

 

 

I am breathing

Heavy pall of broken glass

Cristall blue eyes

Shadows of cats

Secrets songs of drunk lovers

Your steps invisible are in the snow

Your body reflection revealed in the glass

Our game

Our betrayal

Our broken hearts

We are strangers

Yet we tremble

Yet I open my sould as a pore to inhale

Light

The light from your eyes

From your breath

 

Your breath

Heavy day lost in those torrid arcades of the purple flesh

Of a sky that no longer exist

Now

Yet

I finish my glass of wine

I open my eyes

I look outside the window

I leave my lipstick on their glass

And I swallow you

I sow you in hidden Parisian streets

I feel you in my high heals

In the trumpet

In the elevator

 

Alone

With you

I am breathing.

 

 

Lake Ohrid Prana

“A man can be himself as long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free”

Arthur Schopenhauer

Ohrid. This place offers to me, as wandering writer, three vital activities:

Inhalation

Inspiration

Illumination.

I personally find immense joy and lust in lonely wandering around the lake-shores of this spiritual portion of nature. There, in my solitude, I find myself: trembling, but calm, overheated but fresh. I inhale, I breath and I fill myself with infinite silence, with some mysterious taste of Being Beyond / Breathing Beneath.

I can hear even the sound of the water, the melody of a lonely tree, the science of the sky, the rhythm of the air, the tender perfume of the pine forest.

 

It is not always important to be always there, sometimes it takes little to be elsewhere and then to win the Everywhere, that frozen moment of space, that spatial zone of time, the infinite possibilities of Humanity: the liquid fire of the sky, the dense silver reflection of the lake.

The eternal breeze of Love.

The gold outskirt of the Soul.

 

It is not always to find yourself, sometimes it is much more important to lose yourself, to roam and wander beyond the horizon, in the frozen depth of a pine forest, in the complicity of the dialogue with the fertile and everlasting Water. Only then one can become truly faithful to Themselves. Only then one can know where that place is, the place of Becoming, the place of Being, the place of Beholding authentically the Selfhood.

 

ONE LIMINAL CITY

 

Something begin to grow and beat

Unclear and innocent

While we were drinking wine with strange girls

I could hear you smiling in the rhythm of an African candombe

When they serve you with a glass of wine

I weave myself around one moment imprisoned in confused kernels

I spit seeds

I stay awake at every  dawn to feel your beats

Heartbeats

How can one fear to grasp the night and then to throw it away?

The violet flowers with morning dew and the mad recalcitrance were not enough?

Leave I cannot

I come to you without knowing if this path has an end

But I know wild berries are flowing in my blood

And I weave a spider’s nest with black spit

A layer of tiny boats

is your promise to me

when you are not here

you are present as never

and your silence is hurting

louder than a cup of black tea breaking through the white wall

in my kernels a fish bone valves interstices in between my teeth

black sperm on someone else high heels

night porter that knows all my secrets

strange angel that does not talk but says it all:

that on this soil someone else’s blood is boiling

 

 

Breath in, rise and shine!

Inhale, inspire and illuminate!

Be the Poet of your life!

 

From Ohrid, with Love,

Truly yours,

Natasha

xxx

Love is Freedom.

TWO PIGEONS

 

There are days when I do not go out from home

the streets do not want me nor the markets

nor people or stations, when I pass by

from the palm of my hand to the pillow and I tremble

orange flower;

 

such are those days, when two lost pigeons

are flying down on my window on noon searching for their dream;

handful wheat I give them from the palm of my hand –

lost in rural buses we are;

 

and so I was searching for you with my smile,

I was searching for you in their scared gaze –

while I was unlocking your heart

 

I was stealing your freedom

while I was holding your hand for years,

and all of a sudden you offered me

the love of the two pigeons.

 

Poetry. Skin.

SKIN

 

Yellow leaves on your skin

Pulled pores of some impalpable silence

Cracked lips

And fervid valley of thoughts and nipples

Liquid

I say, are you alone

Or time flows away standing still pretty distant from the conventional clock

But I hear on the pale layers drops slipping out

Secretion, tears, wine

Yet, it is not the first time nor is once

But nonce, a perpetual returning back

As you close your eyes facing the choice you do not want to take

As this time comes by, this autumn

On your skin

In an eruption of inconvenient improper indecent spaces