La freccia e il cerchio
anno 7, numero 7, 2016
pp. 289-291

10.
Ewa Chrusciel
Migrant illusions

Volunteer dreams

An oak branches under the water
bifurcates, our wavelengths stretch infinitely

and & and & and. Litany of ampersands, whales and waltzes

I carry your hearts just as San Miniato carried his head through the Arno
River.
I write these letters carefully not to mangle our alphabet.
Will you arrive like a sparrow, finding God’s small things in the quotidian
cracks
Will you arrive like a tigress, hungry and slinking for beauty?
As a lotus lives in its water, I, rooted in you.
*
These trees were migrants first
spruce & pine & then fir & birch
hornbeam & beech & gingkoes washed ashore

Wrath, sea urchins and anemones, ferns
Hedgehogs of dried flowers and thorn crowns.

The branches conceal seeds
Without shore or limit

Walking trees,
in fishing boats, on rafts
dust blows
bodies into the shore

Gingkoes washed ashore

Birds carry trees in their beaks

Pileated woodpeckers, excavators
makers of eyes

The beech leaves everything unfern,
Even you, this horizontal lake on your head
The blue heaviness

The trees are brides and frogs and green crumbs
storing air as words. Dipper fieldfare

these trees under water
breathe

the refugees rain inside the trees

A Settler from the Shore:

The sea has apparitions. The sea contracts out
the refugees; migrants, walking trees, branches
conceal seeds without shore or limit.
In blue-bin bags they carry what
they have, beg for change
small change; cell
phones, sleeping bags
some money dust blows
over barbed wire.
Swaddled like sardines
in Armani, Gucci, Dior they get
on their boats, dust
blows pairs of sneakers;
articles of clothing; torn up
tents; migrant toothbrushes; bodiless acts
of exiles, a Syrian toddler. Synapses and quarks
fleck the sky. The grass the air the phlox. We could
leap words to count
the routes of their returns. Lift two thousands bee balms,
and foxgloves to the light. Check
the pulse of air.
Splashers of transparency.
Pollinators of the ineffable.
The tip of air–
feel the apparition
[…]