“Your favorite place on Earth?
A village in Italy called Trevi.”
– dari wawancara dengan Goenawan Mohamad di The Jakarta Post Weekender Magazine, September 2007.
cf.
Trevi
1.
There is a museum by the city wall
where daylight lays its sepia on our
skin, and you, seeking me,
drunken, legless, two
by two. Still the same
old love. Gorgeous,
holy, and just as
improbable as the current
that electrifies the cobblestone.
What does it mean:
to stumble upon a place?
2.
No curtains here to draw,
from and out of five
years of rising to a
pale-cheeked dawn.
No frost on the hinges
to suggest what is
preserved in my stead.
The stone churches are quiet.
3.
It is very late.
Bossanova from a churchyard
laps up the hour.
I drink to a night
turned color.
The black curls of
streetlights say it’s time.
Or: don’t go home yet.
4.
Under gypsy lashes
a red-blooded woman peers.
Francesco heeds: catching
her, like every Casanova,
ever so by the tip. Darling.
We’ll be here again,
he breathes between their
wanton tongues:
three months, not even.
I love you, she says,
it being clean and simple.
Like silver (easily dented).
5.
Wrinkled paper, you say?
Don’t worry, everything here
is a bit like that: yes, even
your eyelids.
Pig-faces, sausages, we have those
too. Here everything surprises and
doesn’t. Sorry, where did you
say you guys come from again?
6.
A very sunny place. Too
golden to remember what
happened to the moon after
the white warrior stole
the three raven-haired
virgins. Or which
among the choir of water,
wind and wakefulness had
uttered the word.
You can almost say
it is a land where all
impossible loves run from.
7.
Later, another night at
Gustavo: three men
and three women,
rearranging partners.
One man always stands
alone, apart, from
the others. Jealousy
is a dance in which
everyone moves.
Oh, but no fear of that,
here, in this place where
everything seems.
To stumble is a good thing,
steadfast and unjealous
in the unknowing.
We Have Come Here
to Get Married
Mid-December in
Chiesa di San Francisco, Trevi
“…and the soul is a bride
in a still place…” – Sylvia Plath
Christ who stares at us pendent
is now the color of rust.
Sadder still, three months on,
in the afternoon silver light.
The organ is a mill of miscarriages.
Hoar frost where color used
to flood with music: red,
orange, purple, pearl.
All night we have bashed each other
with guilt and admonishments.
This is December. And end-of-year
evaluation of good and bad, and
you and I clawing to the edge
of the bed, knotting and
unbraiding, rushing the death-blow
of poppies glimpsed in summer.
In the morning we talked about the
gray-swept graveyards of Gubbio,
chilled to solid but decanted in
half-light, the lips of jugs.
But in this church of honed edges
today has melted its images out.
Noiseless, we walk towards the altar
along the tear marks snaking down
the wall. And in the quiet,
the sheeted mirrors
strain to hear an answer
known only to the bride.
– dari Laksmi Pamuntjak, The Anagram, KataKita, Depok, 2007, pp. 36-41.
(p.s. the next poem is ‘Two Poets in Bed,’ no mention of Trevi in it, though wherever it is, it’s somewhere in ‘a very sunny place,’ too, where ‘the sun falls in patterns of stars’ and things (trees?) ‘hide [other things] from the sun’, and the two poets woke up on ‘Sunday 8 am,’ stayed in bed all day, and only continued writing quatrains at ‘Sunday 9 pm.’)
Divagyrations 