Earlid: Sing, Singe / una pallida mummia

I was invited by Joan Schuman to contribute to her new project Earlid by responding to two words:

sing, singe

One word ‘resonant with joy or melancholy, the other sinister, ashy’.

I added an R. 

It became a text to be partly spoken, peeled off the page, but never quite so, a text from memory and a text that is read and spoken inside your head – hence the rhythm which is never entirely flowing.

The Italian poet Amelia Rosselli, who wrote in between three languages and wasn’t afraid of letting their structures coexist when she wrote in Italian, and who studied music, observed that sometimes written words hold sound, but this sound is in fact absence, and it only echoes in the reading mind and it can never be only sound.

Hence her long paratactical sentences with no stresses or resolving turns, with strings of echoes, that claim to be read aloud but leave you breathless:

Colma di ansie tributarie rinascevo a miglior vita. Colma
di perdono e di riguardi, stancata dalle bestie liberatosi
dai buchi della mia coscienza stufa degli inganni e delle
reciproche battaglie-desolata del vuoto e piena di vita
esausta come una pietra su della quale troppo si cammina
rinascevo a peggior vita; testa tonda e guanti di feltro.

Contavo perle e stringevo fra le braccia una pallida mummia.