Okie And I- Ii Poem by Liberatore Suffoletta

II

Things never happen to Okie.
He covertly leaves the yard
and walks Dover and is delayed,
perhaps mechanically,
watching the arc of a vestibule
and the door closing;
he gets the news from the mailman.
I see his name on a short list
of the town’s honorary citizens.
He likes clocks of sand, floor maps,
the typography of etymologies,
the scent of coffee and prose of Dumas
and in a vain way turns those likes
into the attributes of an actor.
He affirms that our relation is complementary;
I live, I let myself live, so that Okie can plot
his Literature and that Literature justifies me.
It doesn’t hurt me to confess
that he has thought up certain valid pages,
but those pages cannot save me,
because of the language or the traditions.
I am in favor of his plots
Though they are destined to lose me,
Little by little I am yielding every path to him,
although my perverse custom
consists in falsifying and in magnifying.
Spinoza understood that the stone eternally
loves to be stone and the tiger a tiger.
Okie has to be in Okie,
not in me (if somebody I am) ,
I am clear less in his look
than in the strumming of a guitar.
Years with time of mythologies
in the suburb playing games
with the infinite, the absolute and the relative,
those games are Okie’s now
and I will have to devise others.
Thus my life is a flight
and I lose all it
and everything is forgetfulness,
or Okie.