Soccer on a Monastery Green

…such greenery hasn’t been seen for a hundred years, 

and maybe even more! Everything is covered with it. 

The forest of bushes is silent and deep. 

Invent a river, a glade, an alley, 

closed off, not yet recognizable. 

                       There might be 

a column, an arch, a complacent tower                 

as white as paper, as tall as a wild plum tree 

(both have been growing since who knows when). 

It’s so green that you can laugh or cry 

between two forests, and an unstoppable soccer ball  

roves between two goals, and sweat, and dry mouth, 

and a bee’s singing through a motionless note. 

Although there aren’t any goalposts. Just two  

bricks, trampled into the grass. And there are 

angel feathers and pigeon feathers in the grass. 

And two light dandelions, only two. 

The ball is flying! However, it’s not here, 

as if it never had been. Just a hot lump 

of living seconds, and it passes us by, but a bit 

enters us before rushing toward the end of emptiness. 

Such is this game: to catch up with the bawling— 

it’s rolling! Against a background of plants 

and walls, where frescoes can be imagined 

like deaths. And like letters carved and erased, 

it leaves an invisible trace, exhales. 

                       Or maybe in spirit. 

Or at least a soccer ball, returned to this grass  

by the past, between two rows of blackberries, 

where Schemamonks sleep in your path, 

where through the thick dense writing of branches 

you will see a river (glade? alley?). 

And you, and me. We stay above 

the depths, the emptiness, the earth.

A Chronicle of 1719 

Carnivals, fairs, boxing matches, all prohibited. 

The guards stand impassable as hedges. 

Just one entertainment remains: 

the public burning of sorceresses. 

Paupers in rags crawl out from everywhere: 

little people with mouths full of sand. 

Obscene graffiti on the palazzo facades 

and a tribunal of corpulent barrators in cassocks. 

And a fortune teller, or sorceress, or witch,  

like a candle ready to go out—just exhale! 

(The town fool sobs and laughs, splitting 

his knickers, dogs bark, brushwood starts to burn.) 

I would defend you, my little mourning torch, 

like memories collect your ashes, piece by piece, 

but the guards are already beating us with clubs 

and spitting on these ancient cobblestones. 

And a pillar of volcanic heat rises up— 

we stand silent as if up to our necks in the river. 

Because the boys in berets have German shepherds  

and they’d tear us apart like rabbits. 

You burn like a book with an unfinished word  

and such gray snow from a cloudy sky, 

you burn like a doll stuffed with chaff— 

the old cellars are full of those poppets, 

the deaf courtyards and sad dungeons 

where years pass, where autumn is eternal, 

there where the linens of the executed flutter, 

you burn like a candle over life.