ENERGY IN STARS

by Fernando Arrabal

What Ferdinando Ambrosino
creates does not bow
to the providence of nature.
And yet he lets himself be carried
by the breath of the universe.

He imagines only the incomparable.

He asks himself: what does the ephemeral,
which lives only for a morning, know of what evening and night are?
What do they know of art, those who love only habit?

Destiny points its finger at
Ferdinando Ambrosino
inebriated by the to-ing and fro-ing
of questions with no answer.
Absorbed in his own thoughts,
he cloaks his innocence in wonders.

All his energy adheres to the marrow
of his skeleton. He manages to escape
and to externalize himself only in the form of paintings:
lines, colours, burns,
matters inevitably
exact in the way they sharpen.

His breathing, penetrating his body,
in his vital rythmn and in his pulse,
adapts and winds
through his veins, from his heart
to the tips
of his twenty fingers and toes.

When he paints, he reflects the breath
of the new-born child. This is the embryonic breathing
of someone who can raise himself, be happy, immortal
only through painting...
of someone who inverts the vital process
to arrive at creation.
And yet he believes he has failed in everything.
He would have liked to be a conqueror,
although,
to achieve this, he might have had to sell
his body
or his soul. He is a painting fanatic.

He believes his body hides poisonous
scorpions,
perverse serpents, alarm bells
ready to denounce to his head
the faults of his belly.
He can expel them only by painting.

[…]

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