As you lie beside me

Running rest-day ...

... here's a translation (from the original Italian) by Jamie McKendrick - taken from his 1997 collection as pictured:


The Embrace
(after Valerio Magrelli)

As you lie beside me I edge closer
taking sleep from your lips
as one wick draws flame from another.
And two night-lights are lit
as the flame takes and sleep passes
between us. But as it passes
the boiler in the basement shudders:
down there a fossil nature burns,
down in the depths prehistory’s
sunken fermented peats blaze up
and slither through my radiator.
Wreathed in a dark halo of oil,
the bedroom is a close nest
heated by organic deposits,
by log pyres, leafmash, seething resins …
And we are the wicks, the two tongues
flickering on that single Palaeozoic torch.