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.
The Italian poet Valerio Magrelli is the author of four collections, for which he has won the Mondello Prize, the Viareggio Prize, and the Montale Prize. He is a professor of French literature at the University of Cassino, and a frequent contributor to the cultural pages of a number of Italian newspapers.
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