Tobacco Kid

You know, his angular chin stirs
my entangled feelings: some days
he’s a little window washer
in an imaginary rectangle,
something born in cinematic memoir.

He’s kittenish, swift
and, with a gesture just as quick,
is dismissed by the tanned back of a hand,
while the other rests on the leather clad wheel,
or by a complaining voice at the traffic light
in the sticky afternoon.

Framing the mind is absurd
yet there he is: a knock-kneed kid,
projected on the discolored wallpaper
of my etiolated memory.

Of him, there were barely a few photograms left in me,
until I met your Mediterranean skin and smile tonight,
to redeem the caramel and the ochre of life
and then the ever-summery smile,
finally merging margins,
when frames and screens disappeared.

In the old movie theater,
you and I were sitting
almost back to back;
we chased the gray, so that
I could feel your silken warmth,
we talked, with sunkissed velvet hands,
inside that private art chapel.

And now, crazy horns and
Southern traffic, midday textures,
tobacco-eyed Marlboro kids
that call: “Uèè guagliò !!” ,
noisily take me back to the streets,
as I realize
I had never been that far,
after all.