I shake my memory. Maybe something in its branches that has been asleep for years will start up with a flutter.<p>No. Clearly I'm asking too much. No… - Wisława Szymborska

My choices are rejections, since there is no other way, but what I reject is more numerous, denser, more demanding than before. A little poem, a sigh, at the cost of indescribable losses.

Possibilities

I prefer movies.
I prefer cats.
I prefer the oaks along the Warta.
I prefer Dickens to Dostoyevsky.
I prefer myself liking people
to myself loving mankind.
I prefer keeping a needle and thread on hand, just in case.
I prefer the color green.
I prefer not to maintain
that reason is to blame for everything.
I prefer exceptions.
I prefer to leave early.
I prefer talking to doctors about something else.
I prefer the old fine-lined illustrations.
I prefer the absurdity of writing poems
to the absurdity of not writing poems.
I prefer, where love's concerned, nonspecific anniversaries
that can be celebrated every day.
I prefer moralists
who promise me nothing.
I prefer cunning kindness to the over-trustful kind.
I prefer the earth in civvies.
I prefer conquered to conquering countries.
I prefer having some reservations.
I prefer the hell of chaos to the hell of order.
I prefer Grimms' fairy tales to the newspapers' front pages.
I prefer leaves without flowers to flowers without leaves.
I prefer dogs with uncropped tails.
I prefer light eyes, since mine are dark.
I prefer desk drawers.
I prefer many things that I haven't mentioned here
to many things I've also left unsaid.
I prefer zeroes on the loose
to those lined up behind a cipher.
I prefer the time of insects to the time of stars.
I prefer to knock on wood.
I prefer not to ask how much longer and when.
I prefer keeping in mind even the possibility
that existence has its own reason for being.

Dimenticano che la vita non è qui.
Altre leggi, nero su bianco, vigono qui.
Un batter d’occhio durerà quanto dico io,
si lascerà dividere in piccole eternità
piene di pallottole fermate in volo.
Non una cosa avverrà qui se non voglio.
Senza il mio assenso non cadrà foglia,
né si piegherà stelo sotto il punto del piccolo zoccolo.

C’è dunque un mondo di cui reggo le sorti indipendenti?
Un tempo che lego con catene di segni?
Un esistere a mio comando incessante?
La gioia di scrivere.
Il potere di perpetuare.
La vendetta d’una mano mortale.