For Taormina, poetry means adventure, giving oneself up, even partially, to the reader and, through verse, wandering "along the roads of the world" in search of that truth which urges within, which gives candour and lightness to the soul and which, as a poet and lover of beauty and truth, he wishes to participate in and give and, above all, to find in the world, where superficiality, lies, indifference, disamour and deception prevail and reign: in short, everything negative that has been established and continues to be practised among men. The "wee hours" are those of creation, or of the "dream", which, even if it remains "entangled / in the branches of dawn", does not abandon the Poet but, on the contrary, strengthens in him the hope that human eyes will be opened to wonder; that the blindness of which the fall of mankind into that emptiness that is the persistent and profound absence of spirituality, and therefore of the divine fullness of being, of the inability to feel part of the Whole, will cease. Comforting, then, is the time taken away from the noisy daily routine and which gathers in the silence of the late hours, in the heart of the night, fecundator of dreams and winged thoughts, when in the peace so much beauty comes to confront and measure itself against the ruined world, to which the Poet does not feel he belongs and therefore his conscience suffers from a lack of poetry and love. Hence the impetus to become a 'pilgrim', a messenger of the loving poetic virtue that can lift men from the 'evil of living', that is, from not knowing how to choose the good to live according to feeling and reason. But words are not enough; they are 'dead language', if they are not dressed in poetry, if they do not sound like 'the notes of a violin', if the music does not correspond to the beauty of nature with which he often identifies the beloved woman, 'naturifying' herself, in turn, thus managing to best express the depth of that feeling, which is 'feeling' part of cosmic harmony. Our poet's poetry is this infinite entertainment with Beauty; it is the possibility of 'communicating', of communing with everything that corresponds to his spiritual 'needs', to the universality of the values and ideals to which he confirms his fidelity and which allow him to make peace with himself and with the world, accepting what remains of it that is good and that it is still possible to preserve, to save: remnants of feelings, fragments of conscience and flashes of light that nourish hope.

The central and transversal theme of this sylloge, but one which already characterises Taormina's entire poetic production, is above all love which, in the age of senility, is linked to time, which is increasingly on the run and, therefore, to memory as a nostalgic recovery of the sweet 'experience' and to death, which here has an indirectly proportional relationship with love. The closer life is to sunset and the more serious the approach to death, the more immortal is the love that accompanies him and overcomes time, which "perhaps" bleached the hair of his wife but did not allow that "gentle" feeling to wither in their hearts, "like a blade of grass / between the pages of a book". The wee hours are also the absence of the beloved, who "takes away the poet's sleep" and revives "the wound", soothed by the "presence" of the woman "returned" to him by the memorial dream. She is present in her intact beauty, reflected in nature; her beloved face appears to him "from the surface / of the stream" or in "a ray / of sunshine". And it is immediately poetry, which illuminates the night and makes the wee hours creative. In the silence, "the curtain opens / for the recital of dreams" which leave the world outside, which celebrate life and make it less precarious, less fleeting, compared to the sudden, quasi-Simodian nightfall. But the dawn returns "the drama", the "evil of living" that invades everything, that throws the Poet into discouragement and existential "fear" after the hours lived "closed in (his) shell" in solitude but with so much "trembling", with so much beauty in his heart. This is how his life proceeds, between highs and lows, between poetry and prose, between the fertile light of night and the arid shadows of day, during which his feelings change, his eyes lose the purity of dreams, a 'fog' descends on his heart, preventing him from shaping 'a poem' and bringing it to light. To compensate for this creative difficulty, to cope with the bewilderment caused by the re-fall into the time of emptiness and the dominant thought of death, the poetry of childhood intervenes, awakened by memories, by voluntary memory that allows our author to rediscover the "ancient springs", the warm embrace of the house, animated by the presence of his mother and grandmother busy at the cooker, by the "smells of the kitchen / the tinned copper / of the pots", and by the dough with "white flour" for bread: sensory perceptions that acquire a meaning, a psychological and epiphanic function, reconstituting the link with time lost and rediscovered, with a welcoming, domestic world, guardian of traditional values, of the feeling of life and civil coexistence. Night, therefore, is the space, mainly, of memory; it is the alcove, the nostalgic meeting place of lost intimacy, the 'biographical' place where the poet's experience emerges, referring abundantly to the time of love and childhood. The night, which is thus populated with sounds, smells, visions, flavours and even tactile sensations, is the great inspirer of Taormina's poetry, of this sylloge in particular, where the ars combinatoria of memories, contrasting feelings and synaesthetic perceptions generates a great and harmonious harmony between form and content, between the musical 'body' and the semantic 'soul' of the work. An evocative, varied and sonorous landscape is offered to the reader, even though it is dominated by melancholy, solitude and the pain generated by 'memories' and the thought of death. And a landscape is the nature that "surrounds" the Poet and adheres to his "skin" and that he wears like "shoes / his shirt". Yes, nature suffers with him, has the same moods as him. He 'envelops' himself in it in order to be closer to his beloved, 'naturified' in turn, but also 'reified', not reduced to a material thing, but strongly spiritualised, present and alive in the objects that take on his face, his breath, and are animated by his essence, transmigrated into them in "butterfly flight". In virtue of her presence, therefore, things are 'personified', they acquire lightness, and our Poet, who lives with the omnipresent image of his woman, feels ready to transmigrate free and light, made so by his beloved, who has penetrated him "like a sail".

dovunque io vada / tu sei in me / sei nella chiave dell’auto / nella bustina di zucchero / del caffè / tra le righe del giornale /tu sei libera / non posso fermare / il tuo volo di farfalla / sei la nota fuggita / da uno spartito / sei l’onda che corre / e saltella come una bambina / verso la spiaggia / tu sei la mia trincea / dove io voglio morire /per essere libero come te / silenziosa / come un bruco / che divora la polpa / di un frutto / tu sei penetrata / dentro di me / scivoli /nelle mie vene /come una vela

He becomes her guide, he feels he must comfort and protect her when "in the shadows of the night" the ghost of death takes shape with the memory of her and the "expectation of return" grows, the desire to see her again, to find themselves together contemplating their image "indelible in time", in the unstoppable flow of the "liquid" "mirror". In this process of 'naturification' and transformation, present and past alternate, intertwine, and exchange roles as actors in the theatre of the elements and of 'memories'. Nature brings back the best of times, everything comes back to life, it becomes immortal, even love with the complicity of memory. But it is poetry that performs the miracle, that allows our hero to stop or slow down the flight of time, concentrating it, confining it to the small hours and thus enjoying the great illusion of eternity, while also contrasting pain and suffering, to the point that these feelings end up sublimating him, raising him to a higher spiritual and moral height. And poetry is the great purifier, which with memory opens up images of extraordinary and poignant beauty1 , illuminating and turning the tiring, painful path where everything seems to cancel itself out, where there is no "beginning" or "end"; where only "hope" reigns that everything can begin again: in the fertile night of love and compassion for the world that has lost its "routes" with childhood; that has suspended human relations, oppressed by the pandemic, which is also a spiritual illness. Hence the poet calls into question our being and our beingness - the only note, this one, full of philosophy.

si è raggrinzito / il cielo / come la pergamena / di una mappa / in cui si sono / sbiadite le rotte

il mappamondo / sogna / che nel mondo / non ci sono dittatori / e pandemie

siamo il tempo / che non ha inizio / e non ha fine / l’eterna speranza / l’albero / che in primavera / si carica di gemme /che saranno frutti

And the most beautiful, indestructible fruit is, of course, love, which the poet has always kept within himself, so that the woman's absence is filled by her image, which sentiment has imprinted on his soul, compensating, removing from him the fear that she does not exist, that she is dead.

tu non mi vedi /perché sei dentro di me (…) ho paura che non esisti

(…) forse tu sei morta

These are lines from two separate poems, which could appear together in one of the texts, and which reveal the woman's absence. And the poet, who has always addressed her as if she were a real presence, who has imagined her as such, now seems to become aware of the sad truth, which he does not hesitate to adumbrate, to question. We are at the end of this work, which can be considered as a single composition due to the cohesion and formal, content-related and semantic coherence of the texts. There are no titles or punctuation in the poems, and even the last line has no final point, because there is no caesura, no solution of continuity in this song of the soul, which flows like an unstoppable stream. Almost like a stream of consciousness, but easy to read because everything is linked, everything is held together by the thread of images, sensory perceptions and feelings, which together constitute the great 'synesthesia' of memory and love. Finally, it should be noted that the index consists of the first line of each poem. The whole of these verses composes a single text, where the logical discontinuity and the missing relations between the parts of the 'text' are justified and brought back to the level of meaning by the same 'stream of consciousness', as well as by the same themes and creative impulse that compose and characterise the body and soul of the whole work. We reproduce the entire index in a footnote. ²

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