in parentheses

Born in 1973 in Italy, Massimiliano Nastri works as a teaching assistant at Queen’s University, Belfast. He keeps reading the works with which Zbigniew Herbert, Akhmatova, and Vittorio Sereni resisted history. The Honest Ulsterman and Ink Sweat and Tears (online), Cypher (November 2022) and Southword (forthcoming) have published his works.

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All these people recreating happiness

All these people recreating happiness
Behind neon curtains, the offices’ realm of ‘no, no; I’m fine I’m grand’.
Circling gas stations, take-aways, parishes, in a light that is darkness,
Garish green, red blood, white street-lines in between.

What they keep looking at seems to be alive,
But shorter than the instalments for the fridge, for the heart,
Accompaniment without the tune,
Twilight soldiers, even in their photos, but with no anxiety.

[All these people recreating happiness]
Converging to the one moment, unrecognized, when all tilted,
Because, like gravity, we all fall at the same rate,
Desires interest the courage of sinking interestingly

[What they keep looking at seems alive]
By watching it closely, the one option says,
It has got too late, and only light and darkness
Have been equally hollowed, walking together but separated.

To a Defeated Young Officer in a Civil War *
More and more life imitates dreaming, as its disorder increases with age.
Leonardo Sinisgalli, “Avvertenza al lettore”. My translation
Dimenticatoio. Mondadori, 1978.

Today you have begun to learn how they do in every house:
They cut flowers for the feast that is ignoring the chinks in the horizon.
Listen: ideals, republics, like roses spring there, out of conquests.
Some Caesars you will know are not bad rulers; anyway, did you put their extra hours?
History tears itself apart: Greek fire defends lithium, the Silk Road or something.
Night, keep an eye on her, how her body loosens from what she sees again and again.
You too lose the ties to many words; exert gratitude for the robe, the rations salvaged,
Like the nest the birds build out of litter. Then you will know how to enjoy sipping coffee,
Looking over Sicilian waters, cypresses, winged-head marble statues,
Files snowing from the windows of official buildings, pyre of insignia warming veterans.
Age, and dreaming will imitate your life’s randomness. Drink both to the bottom,
Spice them with dances, tender loves, games, friends; don’t refuse these stereotypes.
Everything around, everything actually, is a wreckage; the rope is woven of thorns.
Don’t go down; look up, look up at the sky, how hungry of that beauty you still are.

• It’s Horatius, but it’s not indispensable to know it.

The Last Metaphor You Have Become
Paradiso V, 133-4: Like the sun, which hides in its excess of light.
Translated by RM Durling. Oxford UP, 2011.

Galaxies are receding from one another, not like a dance, not at all,
Not on Avignon Bridge, not anywhere from where I got no reply.
Plastic, antibiotics, polls, idiotic Prime Ministers – all flowing adrift.
We are the by-products of them all, and Gilgamesh won’t come down to us.
The inevitable is known, its terror is vacuous, but that vacuum is the terror,
The darkness of being a perfect island, perfect in its habits,
Its autarky, the humbleness of having survived tragedy and bliss.
Why should there be another chance as most matter is dying and doesn’t matter anyway?
Majorities keelhaul the messenger, but black-sailed news keep blowing.
Maybe this by-product I am now is better where sunsets are longer.
I still see stars; the estrangement will make them unprovable, absurd,
As it were “a sun that hides itself for too much light”, a joy of darkness,
Then bringing all back to a dawn scattering all traces of us,
The way we had been, far, further apart, true galaxies to the end.

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