FLUCTUANT

From Giorgio Colli's 1948 Physis kryptesthai philei / La natura ama nascondersi / Nature Loves to Hide, picked up in the music room while waiting in the phenomenally, otherwise maddeningly downtempo national library for an ordered tome: "Such a vertiginous multiplicity of historical lines of sight, through which entire worlds of concepts are constructed on the basis of few and scanty expressions, is further multiplied and rendered ambiguous by the exact uncertainty of philological inquiry, which seeks in vain scientifically to dominate material that is floating, open to question—a field, that is, where the evanescence of dead stuff sucks vigor from every proof."

[“Tale molteplicità vertiginosa di visuali storiche, per cui interi mondi di concetti si costruiscono sull’appoggio di poche e scarne espressioni, è ancora moltiplicata e resa ambigua dall’incertezza propria dell’indagine filologica, che tenta invano di dominare scientificamente un materiale fluttuante, opinabile, un campo cioè dove l’evanescenza di cose morte toglie vigore ad ogni dimostrazione.” Translation, naturally, by yrs literally.]

Spectacular tissue of sky shift from one garden brink to the next, cypressed. Meal after meal of variegating, archivebreaking deliciousness. Old-school appeal after honey chatter for an autograph from the Olympic track champion "for my parents." Mental polaroids of a zillion preciousnesses of mutual unearthing scattered and released. So as to taste, to breathe. Now not then. Rosselli's Documento was titled as such, I found ten years in, out of irony, in full awareness that what poetry remembers it remembers capriciously and as flotsam. This near year; this medium, vaporizable. Amity, to last?

"Peripatetic historicism," the philosopher/philologist/historian called it in his learned book. A route, not reliquary, to remembrance. The Italians being light years ahead of North America on memory, liminal and enfleshed.