All four quarters of the world begin from an occult
groundplan.
The sketch of the inverted city is like
a chessboard. In black-and-white fields
depicted knights and pawns, horsemen and
men-at-arms whose spears smell of dry leaves
and cracked earth.
Facades are like vast doors, and pavements
like rectangles pressed down by the walls' shadow.
Where one expects the city to begin the universe shrinks
and the earth founders in the darkness.
Passers-by say: the swallow-well of fortune is here.
They lean over invisible circles, toss in a coin
or lucky charm that long rolls in the dark;
like a cooled and stifled sun.
From the interior of the city people are like shadows.
They drip along the thin membranes of slender roots.
Like tubers they collect the damp blueness
of wrecked walls. The dark divides silently
about the verticals of the empty avenues.
Where one expects the city to end, bright sky
above a masthead. Islands of silt between
abandoned courtyards. Not far away is a
railway station with freshly painted signs and drinking
fountain encircled by a wooden fence.
A lion and a serpent canopy the droplets' reflections.
Obscure the signals by which the moonlight yields to the waters of the earth.
One hears the rolling of the sea and the rocks.
The sculptor Ferroni gives his first instruction to the local masons.
Objects buried deep have the scent of a sand-covered
floor. They take their true shape from constellations
scattered in the darkening paths.
In the inverted city spring and winter change
places, through a multitude of cracks.
History sheds what was sleeping under the
swan's wing. What inscriptions swam into view
in the astronomers' calendars?
Summer and autumn brim with their proper legends.
Unhemmed maps of past centuries in the wells.
The sages renounce the tales of the stars.
Clearings in the underground illuminated by bright
crystals: they are brighter than Halley's comet.
They await it in September:
a tailed star, returning once every three thousand years.
They will see it on the horizon in a misty
cloak of foam. Stargazers watch toward the sea,
clad in white. They move away from the walls
and float like the fluorescent numbers of
watches in darkness. The city still sways before them;
a shining sapphire sails with the stars
like a solid dazzling ship
from Lloyd's museum.

Translation: 2007, Kim Burton