Poem: The Grace of the Window!

By Arian Galdini

In the morning,

before the city puts on the face

it needs in order to go out into the street,

a window stands open

over a room

where no word has entered yet.

Light does not come there as victory.

It enters slowly,

like a hand that does not wish to wake the pain,

but only to feel the forehead

of one who has slept little

and risen with weight.

On the chair lies a shirt.

Not white.

Not clean.

Not poor.

Only left there,

with the low hush of things

that ask

for no pardon,

no glory,

no witness.

There is more history in it

than in many words

that leave the mouth

without knowing

what shoulders carry.

Yesterday is there.

A little sweat.

A little dust.

A crease at the collar

where fatigue remained

longer than the body.

One sleeve folded back

by the haste of a man

who tried not to be late

and still

arrived late to himself.

Outside, the street wakes.

Cars.

Footsteps.

A seller’s voice

that comes out earlier than the light.

A child held by the hand,

not yet knowing

that one day

he will have to hold himself.

Every morning the city rises

with its tired zeal,

as though haste

could save a person

from the weight of his own life.

In the faces passing below the window

I do not see only people.

I see lives

trying not to lose their shape

while time makes them faster,

more useful,

easier to count.

But in the shirt

there remains that part of a person

that cannot be counted.

The shirt on the chair

does not speak of dignity.

It carries it.

Weariness stays in its folds.

The body is not there.

The shirt remembers.

Not the fabric.

Not the stitching.

Not the color.

But that absent warmth

still resting inside it,

like a low conviction

that the body does not leave entirely

even when it is no longer there.

The shirt makes no sound.

It remains.

And by remaining,

it turns your face back

toward the place

from which you had turned away.

When a shirt

becomes only clothing,

and the hand

no longer knows how to pause

over a simple thing

without lowering it,

something falls

without a sound.

Meanwhile, the light

has grown in the room.

It falls on the chair,

on the shirt,

on the wall where a thin shadow

trembles without a voice,

and for one moment

nothing looks beautiful.

It looks returned.

Later,

the door opens.

The footsteps leave.

The city swallows its day again.

But here,

the chair remains.

The window remains.

And on the chair

the folded shirt remains,

not as memory,

not as a moral sign,

but as the last form

the body left behind

before stepping out again

into the day

that does not ask how it rose.

And in its fold

there remains a small warmth

the day

could not take.

Arian Galdini