Selected poems from “Música i escorbut”

My keys, when they fall on the ground, make the noise
of a gong or the bell of some religious
ceremony with a God I do not know.
Because the ground was wet, I saw the gleam
of the safety-pin that had been dropped
on the pavement, and a bit before that the mattress
soaking up last night’s rain. My hands
trembled when I wanted to open the door.
A God I don’t know and who sports a cap and,
why not, a moustache, and punches the tickets
on the vaporetto that was making Venice recede.
Your pass and mine, joined by a hole
of synchronicity that afterwards was going to make us
vanish. You were not supposed to fall
until you were outside the underworld. No looking,
as simple as that. And now you are four or maybe
forty, and your eyes are full of sand. You squeeze
your pain, your eyelids are hate, and a voice
from nowhere rebukes you, demands that you open them; now,
they tell you to weep. “Look,” they repeat, “look”:
Eurydice isn’t there, she cannot be lost again.
Yes, these damaged, bloodshot eyes are still
yours. And the narrow pass that leads to Hades.