Davide Trame
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MEMORY’S FEET
On the top we found snow,
a lot of it, virgin, powdery.
Snow and sunlight.
We ate our lunch on a bench,
a fir-tree grazing our heads.
We munched silently
surrounded by the infinitesimal
eyes of the glitter,
the blanket of blinding dots.
To go back down we took a path
swallowed in snow
and our sinking in it was slow
but definite, in the thick carpet
white like amnesia.
So we turned back,
scared by blankness,
and found another path
where snow was friendly
and not much, just enough
to cushion our steps
and soften the descent.
The other side of the mountain
faced us snowless, mauve,
soft to the eyes, a stare-
our ancestors’ maybe-
like an assisting nod.
A nod that stays, now,
stuck with the obstinacy of the stones
that, though scattering, keep close
and roll while clustering
around memory’s feet.
Like faces and names
that no matter how forgotten
don’t want to go away.
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FIR TREE
It’s inside now, in a vase.
It’s the time of the year when we need
a memento from the forest.
Once I smelled in it
the fullness of iron green
and was gripped and swept
into a road of breaths
and shuffling dark green.
The deep North in an instantaneous gust.
Now, to be sincere,
that smell is faint,
it’s the memory of what it was.
But I breathe it
as if I were treasuring
the few drops I could gather
from the forest sap
in my cupped hands.
More than enough
on the way to the border.
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