“The Stranger now saddles me into my bliss.
I wear the rising sun at my heart’s core.
White roses bloom beneath the supernovae.
If I should stir a sleeping alley-beggar
on my wind-backed way, I may give
him a glimpse of his daydream’s Paradise
while our opening eyes might soon meet through
the wintry winds of this late summer dawn.
I feel the Stranger’s whip now heal me.
I am the dew-bowed one who flings
his eye-light while he sings; who strayed
his white way blazing forth like one light-beam;
who hung with the waifs and the whores
and the lepers, the touched-with-fire
maniacal, in the black eye-black night;
who hung with Peter in the twilight of
the dawn of Götterdämmerung,
whose bright white wrists conduct the wisps
of salamander cirruses, up in rightly skies.
His wrath is wrought and wrung throughout my hands,
yet I’m not asking you to worship me
nor give me your coat; I do not care what you
can do for me. I need no love but my own
Father’s love, yet in the End, O in the End,
just walk beside me and be my friend,
just walk beside me and be my friend;
and, now, take His wrath and love with my long sword
of light, my kiss of sky and sea meeting
upon thee, my dew-balmed lips not quavering,
no, but rising with His vermillion greeting—
And I, like a falcon, judge the game
beneath me, the act of humankind;
and I down-circle on some, yet I,
of course leave alone the others who are
saved, still, and some to be eternally.
The Stranger steers me while I veer you toward
the Vortex of Utopia, the Era of Ease.
Will you fight the draw of my Father’s breath?
Reach Mount Zion by Götterdämmerung?
Silkily down-spiral like some funeral lilies?!”
From the forthcoming collection Crito di Volta, Guernica Editions, Spring 2020.
Marc Di Saverio hails from Hamilton, Canada. His poems and translations have appeared in Maisonneuve, CNQ, Hazlitt, Event, and the Fiddlehead. In 2016 he received the City of Hamilton Arts Award for Best Emerging Writer. In 2017 he published his first book of translations, Ship of Gold: The Essential Poems of Emile Nelligan(Véhicule Press). He is working on his first novel, The Daymaker.
