Away
     for Amelia Rosselli

Your figure fades
into the shut I pretend
is space. Your substance
in its absence becomes 
more real every day.

The icons don't respond.
At every symmetry I see
your mouth kissing
its escape away. They say
you have lovely lips.

Recast or withdrawing
the footsteps of regress
I try to imagine you hanging
just a little to the back
of the photograph

we didn't take. In a snap
you never get decision
to admit its determinents.
Each door is an obvious
distraction.

Verbs, I want verbs to take
me away to where you are said.
But I don't believe it anyway.
Down the street I just saw
your back! But still

you haven't arrived before
what was surely to have been
my after. It's like some sort
of plot in which there is no
action.


[from Marcello Frixione and Tommaso Ottonieri]
August 26, 1998