Roberta Bertozzi interno 38

levatrice (midwife)
Graphic project by Calligraphie
Raffaelli, Rimini 2004

III

In the papers
the sources would get complicated
under the sink, inside innocent pipelines
where mothers would shell the leftovers
of rinse waters
like shells in a bucket.
Thus we trusted the map
to loosen the bolts
to sense which frontier
becomes sign of the temple.

IV

Then once opened the gates
we encountered the glands
with their bare faces.
The oozing into the alcove-nest
would sound as an inward voice
it was the grateful
awakening.
Our bones prematurely became stones
penetrated the hardness of stones
and the soul bent itself to the organs,
to the nut-like piece of the heart.

Instead of the horizontal and epistemological level of memory – of which one already knows the hereditary mass of concepts to rummage through – this poetry favours the vertical feature of impressions, as it better serves the purpose of fully accomplishing Bertozzi’s vocation to draw from mankind’s archaic portion, inhabited by the non-logical remains of knowledge. Going back to the collection’s title, it can be observed that, whereas childbirth is the unquestionable law of life, the midwife embodies both life’s form and discipline, as well as its method and interval, i.e. a number that resides in present time, at the very moment of being born; because of such interference, we haven’t lived that typically instinctive and obscene fullness of the very act of being born. It is the affirmation of a precise obligation, which belongs to those who, like Bertozzi, do not want to associate birth to the beginning of one’s own existence, one that is conscious of an inner world that indeed precedes time; it is the duty to watchfully face one’s own soul and to carefully return, at any time, each one of the soul’s most secret gazes.

Domenico Settevendemie