øjeRum, Daniel Rabuzzi, Louise Mather, Alison Sesi

TRAJAN’S ARCH NEAR BENEVENTO

Daniel Rabuzzi

(Inspired by Piranesi’s etching of the Arch from 1778, and his comment in Prima parte di architetture e prospective in 1743:  “These speaking ruins have filled my spirit with images that accurate drawings…could never have succeeded in conveying.”)

The only caesar who passes beneath me now is the shepherd.

Jackdaws breed in my i’s and e’s.

Dog-vines gnaw and knead me.

Yet, I am the geometry of your imagination.

I am the frame of your ambition still,

A scaffold, a cantilevered hope.

Dacia remembers,

So too Araby, old Susa and Ctesiphon.

Yet, I wonder

That your ambition should be so

Small.

DECIDUAL CAST

Louise Mather

             Old summer for moths that lay

under the water

              mausoleum prised red lungs

or decidual cast

                   scratch down my leg

                                 reminiscent of a roof

dusk in mouth

                            stage of wreckage

I told you about troika in retrograde

                   surface to darkness

                                       premonition in

warm blood

                        weapons, portals, writing

in deserts

                             everything a fabric

          your awakening

THE MARABOUT

(The story of Mauro Prosperi at the Marathon des Sables, 1994).

Alison Sesi

Resting place of a holy man, bearing the very name he was known by in life:

‘One who is garrisoned’- and forever so.

Unlike the dunes that shapeshift and morph, making all landmarks disappear from

that transient landscape...this trinity of housing remains, weathering those

sandstorms that fill its interiors, burying the buried.

For centuries visited only by Bedouins and bats, until an endurance athlete, blown off

track, and out of the world, vanished into wilderness: banished on to another course

leading to this shrine enshrined in the desert, a monument to some civilisation so far

away from ours.

The body already lying here might have been joined by another, which the search

party could easily find: death the runner embraced in order to release, with his blood,

his pension, allowing his family to live once he had been declared deceased.

His body, though, defied him: having not died in this attempt at the race he had

intended to complete, its parchedness refused, when he attempted this new intent, to

release his soul.

The Sufi, guarding this precious and eternally splendid isolation, thus sent him hence

from the sarcophagus: for once discovered, but desiring not to be disturbed by a life

drained away – the company of a fellow corpse.

Different the runner’s later discovery - that of the next run of his life - aiming for the

clouds: ‘twas of himself, housed in the remainder of his body...for sure alive, but

barely recognisable.

The Sahara’s sands delivered him to his destiny: to rejoin the nearer world whence

he had come.