You were living in the day when the light
thinned the sky,
as the equinox
drew out the autumn flight of birds.
I wrote your name and you drifted away,
the light slid over the letters,
silence gathered between us,
a thin snow settled on the words,
a manuscript where poems
withdrew like waters
before the gods were first called.

An elastic space stretched between us,
a tram stop,
a distance measured in hesitations,
in unfinished poems
and in the pause between
un fiore colto e l’altro donato.
We lived in a colorless, oblique time,
on the last day of school,
you, in your long - sleeved blue shirt,
me, in my knee - length pinafore,
carrying the childhood keepsake books
and the alchemical journal,
the schoolclock showing the lyric of the hours,
we had already crossed the horizon.

We were living in the thinning light,
where names dissolve in silence
and the seasons carry on,
then in the fading distance,
your shadow has crossed the air,
a memory unfolding
in the place we couldn’t share.

I remained here, cartographer of your silences,
drawing maps over an illusory heart,
a marsupial of feelings,
an alphabet without shapes,
where letters were held
in white and golden stones,
metaphors left unspoken,
like wild thyme
on a russet mound of autumn.