Arsenic Lobster poetry journal
Issue Twenty
Summer 2009
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CYPRESSES
Davide Trame

A row of them uphill
like steps in a ladder.
Standing out in their green
among the wintry hanging oaks'
scaly skin.

Green blades, alluring
a quiet breeze,
with a busy, tight
swarm of eyes inside
overlapping.

Walking by them we sense
the stones in the soil
crowding like jewels
in dry mud, clay,
a knuckled life,

a gathering
and scattering of hooves' taps
along rocks' crests
and a deer's flash, a rolling ibex,
antlers reeling, lit dust.

The richness of earth's limbs,
its indented ribs and alveoli.
Our gaze on them
as mute as a gaze can be,
on the swaying and flickering

of these self-trimmed green flames.
By them we feel
more vertical at each step,
dots in the sky's steady swarm,
still though forward-going, brightly torn.

About Davide Trame

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