Amelia Rosselli, Hospital Series

Hospital Series Amelia Rosselli Translated from the Italian by Deborah Woodard, Roberta Antognini, and Giuseppe Leporace Hospital Series NEW DIRECTIONS POETRY PAMPHLETS #1 Susan Howe: Sorting Facts; or, Nineteen Ways of Looking at Marker #2 Lydia Davis / Eliot Weinberger: Two American Scenes #3 Bernadette Mayer: The Helens of Troy, NY #4 Sylvia Legris: Pneumatic Antiphonal #5 Nathaniel Tarn: The Beautiful Contradictions #6 Alejandra Pizarnik: A Musical Hell #7 H.D.: Vale Ave #8 Forrest Gander: Eiko & Koma #9 Lawrence Ferlinghetti: Blasts Cries Laughter #10 Osama Alomar: Fullblood Arabian #11 Oliverio Girondo: Poems to Read on a Streetcar #12 Fifteen Iraqi Poets (ed., Dunya Mikhail) #13 Anne Carson: The Albertine Workout #14 Li Shangyin: Derangements of My Contemporaries: Miscellaneous Notes #15 Sakutarō Hagiwara: The Iceland #16 Poems of Osip Mandelstam (ed., Peter France) #17 Robert Lax: Hermit’s Guide to Home Economics #18 Ferreira Gullar: Dirty Poem #19 Amelia Rosselli: Hospital Series Hospital Series AMELIA ROSSELLI Translated from the Italian by Deborah Woodard, Roberta Antognini, and Giuseppe Leporace N E W D I R E C T I ONS P O E T RY PA M PH L E T S # 1 9 Copyright © 1969, 2015 by the Centro di Ricerca sulla Tradizione Manoscritta di Autori Moderni e Contemporanei Translation copyright © 2015 by Deborah Woodard, Roberta Antognini, and Giuseppe Leporace Afterword copyright © 2015 by Roberta Antognini Compilation copyright © 2015 by New Directions Publishing All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, or television review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher. Serie ospedaliera was first published in 1969 by Il Saggiatore (Milan, Italy). Grateful acknowledgment is made to the Centro di Ricerca sulla Tradizione Manoscritta di Autori Moderni e Contemporanei at the University of Pavia for granting permission to publish this edition. Publication was made in part possible by a grant from the Lucy Maynard Salmon Research Fund. Thanks to the Vassar College Research Committee for its support. Some of these poems first appeared, often in a different version, in the following journals: Action Yes, Artful Dodge, Chelsea, Common Knowledge, Kritya, Poetry Northwest, and The Spoon River Poetry Review. A handful also appeared in The Dragonfly: Selected Poems of Amelia Rosselli, 1953–1981 (Chelsea Editions, 2009)—special thanks to Alfredo de Palchi. Cover design by Office of Paul Sahre; interior design by Eileen Krywinski Manufactured in the United States of America New Directions Books are printed on acid-free paper First published as New Directions Poetry Pamphlet #19 in 2015 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rosselli, Amelia, 1930-1996. [Poems. Selections English.] Hospital series / Amelia Rosselli ; Translated from the Italian by Deborah Woodard, Roberta Antognini, and Giuseppe Lepoarce. pages cm ISBN 978-0-8112-2397-3 (alk. paper) I. Woodard, Deborah, translator. II. Antognini, Roberta, translator. III. Lepoarce, Giuseppe, translator. IV. Rosselli, Amelia, 1930-1996. Hospital series. V. Rosselli, Amelia, 1930-1996. Hospital series Italian. VI. Title. PQ4878.O8A2 2015 851’.914—dc23 2014038438 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin by New Directions Publishing Corporation 80 Eighth Avenue, New York, NY 10011 ndbooks.com Hospital Series By an experience impossible and dauntless we laboriously ruptured isolation, but the wagons that carried us like fruit to market were gloomy automobiles white if it snowed, infernal in the rain. Corrupting guard upon guard the mind settles upon a labored checkpoint for it deceived even itself: the party was an encounter of fashionable devils, each love fled when you unlatched the window of your poisoned power on the arm of my enchantment poor attempt at envy, but the spirit triumphed again with poor decisions made in the cellar. After suffering and hidden desperation sunday was a reprieve and a desperation, the sea in motion muffled the spirit’s quarrels while gearshifts brought relief and the guilt was guilt acknowledged if desperation motions on toward bliss.    Ŧ 7 seventy beggars and a shirt tearing itself in the naught, on a lark I stretched out in the naught and all was laurel and beneficence, beneficiated the king of the poor, slithering camel. A hard, light rain penetrated, in need of assistance I penetrated into rooms furnished for a truer life which in capital letters slipped away from mine, most obliging were those condemned to death. Invitations slithered across the rain-drenched hinges of a permeable city: no hidden beast powdered the goats marching enraptured toward the mounts of the Trinity: a camel, two Indians, and the people master of all the arts, music and mathematics, the furor of realizable dreams. Lost in the pool of shadows white spider webs and powder for the eyelashes, grains of sand and small pearls under a most miserable rain wisely settled on a shuttered life.    Ŧ Two monkeys furrowed the soul with invisible tracks, the heart took it hard, old mustached sentinel, corrupt, drunk, tenacious, without hope yet expecting the whole curved sky on its sleeve. Does the heart have a sleeve? you ask and irony it, too, besleeved (cookie-riddled) draws or scratches a tremulous arabesque on the opaque hills of the brain: irony’s a needle, storms bathe with opaque sadness the wanton blood, oh how breath runs to cut off the sentinels! (here lunacy you pulled off a kind of party, freed me.)    Ŧ Harsh the three-way sentence. On the outs with the archipelago we were swept away by the river, inorganic event, land and sea spat blood instead. As you left, I saw myself in the vast archipelago that was my mind so rigorous, logical, desperate from such a void: one battle, two, three battles lost. But the furor of our glances, you lantern that thought to guide, I broken winch, but the furor of these looks of ours foiled us: victory assured the battle won the bandits stronger than us, the union of two souls one tarantella.  8   Ŧ 9 The melancholy moon bent down tearful. Innocent rivulets, half-empty boats, large lakes in the mountains premise my being yours, and obedient. a sky-blue sun, a sprinkle of clotted crystal early morning, the lights still on, neighborhoods teeming with senility, the laundress with a basket but her shoulders tremble. Small doses of ingrained tranquility! red the    Ŧ indisposition, if your mind slumbers. Your watercolors discomposed my mind loquacious from winterstice. Throughout spring’s discomfiture, I, storm-tossed ship, was still craftily scaling the bright carousels: drowned treasure yours and mine. The paintbrush quivered gently in the simplicity of a shack discomposed by winter that was an unremitting cruelty, a sleep of yours hidden from my prayers, a slipping away from railroad tracks often sliding toward my head instead, bowed when there was light.    Ŧ Pale, exhausted, wrathful you warded off swallows while I painted equally enamored of nature and my need. Sex violent as an object (quarry of whitened marble) (curved amphora of clay) and artfully concealed in the form of an egg assailed the solitary one, as though hail were storming, in the living room. Not sybaritic nor sage serpentinely influenced by illustrious examples or illustrations of candor, it festered for peace and for the soul. Not sage nor sybaritic, but sage and mercantile rammed like the vessel against batlike rocks, it tumbled from the height of rigor and of the dance, from the sol fa mi do of another day: not sage and not sybaritic disguised as a soldier gasping and hazarding among the pigpens ransacking, in form and substance, sex had its way with him.   And the light discomposing into equal parts evolved economical colors of the trainman’s map. 10   Ŧ   Ŧ 11 Hanging faces, bronzes on the wall, brazen faces, saints hanging on the wall of a solitary rented room, for four days I wait. A poor room, weighed down by plastic flowers, and lions at the door. A strumpet sea, and a hick town, outside green doors behind the new road, invisible mountains, the light’s a diadem. Hills then green horses, their gallop an imbroglio, a stratagem for self-oblivion. It’s still hot, and the sky is stained with unmarked graves. 12 5 Poems for a Poetics (Reggio Emilia) 1) Allow me chains of indulgence, save me from the sinking ship, lofty thought drive off the argonauts from this my dwelling of unknown dimensions; revive my lips imploring alms, reduce to ash the remainder of my days not so squared you can’t judge justly, transparent if you verify it, though anything but a tranquil exploration. Where is one who comes, who leaves, incomprehensible I remain and tramp up and down a peasant’s night spots: thick hands rasped breath crystallemums of indifference, I don’t give a damn! hurled against your target. Pressing on shifty merchants infringing on vicissitudes, no—I wanted to say, but couldn’t hold it, the urine and the moon and commerce innocently crystallized themselves to do me in—thus press on, sophisticated anguish of the moons—thus make me understand! Night’s routine (a lively night was the night) routine of not finding not understanding not forgiving the bagatelle that’s my refrigerator, cudgels for the beast so completely self-absorbed it begins sneezing. Collision of beasts and of landslides, my dreams won’t leave me in peace press then the pursuit of pleasure, I seek you alone. 13 2) 3) Practically wild I stretched out powerful rhinoceros on the hillside of your capital: that is: I know not: I want not: you are not: I see not: I stay not: not: not, not, not, capital of my dexterities because I lost you peasant shouter of semantics to the infinite, I’m not sure if I’ve made myself clear, but I no longer see you taking shape between my stricken arms for the tithing of the score that never took place. What I hoped to say flew out the window and the softness of your glance fails to corrode your gift of freshness: thought has nothing to do with it! I don’t see you, I’ve nothing to do with it: coalesced thought means nothing to me but a coagulated collision of strokes upon the parochial head of secrets. Secret of the night and of the tomb dangerous adversary of the moonless, your miraculous parochial chiseling ushers in my end and begins another one. Clarity desert of the intellect runner in the mood for a sandwich, beside the fountain sits the whore, crematorium of linguistics is the farce of our credence of our credentials. For I tried to be clear. For I was dying by you, sleepless night owl my emotions. For the nights dragging on like a stroke I rhymed permanent luxurious lust. For the roguish nights in the furrow of the nights I am truly without end. For the insatiable limbs for the insensible beast for the nights for the look, for the eye that at this juncture hung itself from a vocabulary, quick recipe for ricotta you look at me and don’t see me you hear me and despair me. For the protagonist who balanced weekly I reply to you: I have not, I see not, I do not clear up the weekly reply that I’m so good. 4) for I can’t promise you that I’m so good. Trust me, there is, for instance, in critique of things, a sign, upon my lips that you are still. Pick up your pen and learn to look around, risk the cough in the vestibulary, nearly, a small circle even, dozens what am I saying, hundreds of clear-eyed glances at my back, night instead a rhyming without backup. 14 15 5) A clear night. Permanent light in the oval room. Soft shouts, your thinking. Kaboom, so much for the light. Shouting softly and gesticulating but without finding any answer is fitting is proper for my rose feet. Particularized sensibilities I don’t aspire to give succor nor to be the one aired by the first crops: that is: dedicated to the truth. What a cruel world this is you exclaim but don’t you see that I’m thinking seek what you can, any kind of furrow, whore of the long sly ears, believe me the battle is nothing but a semantic rivolution. Cropping up in his glance the reflex action of my harebrained body the first crop. That is: pay attention: the points are three: wide the shoulder thin the neck and the lips are soft. Versatile blend of smells of certain small ambitions I can’t say are anything but evident everybody knows it. Believe me the boats in the muddled rivers are rotund: I have nothing else to say, the breath is a strategy to confound oneself in language, that if you wish, and can, and remember, and clear is your suffering mind with clear meningitis, the assembly rules in short discussions returning to vocabulary, break my neck assume that I’m like the rest of you, who in catatonic language mask the engagement of your mother.  16   Lifting of weight and fate’s peculiarities little peeping doves my energies are taken by your flying away like a candy, liquefied vocation for a semantic revision of our quarrels our birds of a feather. None of the soldiers who truly wanted to remarry knew how to tell me who’s the one who truly marched. . . . solitary in the didactic realms I held up, little brigand, disappointed by such a miserable fate, oh you see I burst and don’t you dare run, the miter over the piano dulls sensations, the metro, camphor, red and curved lips bricks of the safe.    Ŧ The goatish sole-curving sky almost vigorously promised: ignorance and terracotta. Believing briefly, beholding each other again, issuing pentatonic disappointment laughter is always bitter; soon you’ll behold the rebirth of lustrous plantations and the harvest, a temporary blindfolding of fate. Ŧ 17 Press your disengagement in the night oversee your plans, amour j’ai t’ai tué: night again the candies a blackboard I slip through your misogynous fingers. Soon you’ll behold the chanting of fate, you rabbit and I together in the evenings of death reduced to an industrial love.    Ŧ life is a vast experiment for some, too void the earth the hole into its knees piercing lances and persuaded anecdotes, I sow you world clasped by the laurel. Though too vast the mystery of your mournful eyes though too false the plea upon my knees I’d like impelled to tell you once again: sow plants in my soul (a snare), for no longer can I stir from kneeling down. Too deep in the sun a dwindling life, too deep in the shade the ball of wool unwinding to the hut, a sea swollen by your eyelids. 18 “Lentement, et très tendrement, quoy que mesuré” (Couperin: 14ème ordre, livre III) 1) Tyranny of relationships; absoluteness of the extinguished fireplace gray and monotonous is your undoing of my night in the dead of night lunaria anoints the true being, while desiring similarly to the battles to disconcert. Before desiring the recount of your ashen dreams, I extinguished the oil lamp criticizing from the corner this incandescent ill held within your arms’ white masonry and if the infallible sonar of my meager thoughts the indivisible defense of this filter believe me: incomplete the description of your malaise, the rest is blood blue and vivacious: in the night of my deposition when cluster by cluster the grape disengaged itself from my believing and charitable fingers it seems a dream conveniently you sell your soul and the scale yields. 19 Response 2) When the heart’s pangs soothe you you seem a wreck and if you are one you gladly sell the two hundred fingers that made you believe I was desiring, in the night broken by little sleepless dreams, it makes sense this perfect uprising. But it seems crack the boom yields, oval in the recalcitrant catacombs and the heart, an erased blackboard so much has the bull done. Unburden yourself quickly so that it seems, a perilous blinding still in your, undoing the pomegranate, harmonious perspective: nail equal to the flesh if you don’t shoot yourself, when youth with its violin struck up a landscape similar to the new subdivided era in the skyscraper of your soul I catch the odor of a match, extinguished no sooner struck and the sky, constant in its cloudiness with open arms has satisfied the needs of the flesh (years) which itself seemed a flower when they slaughtered the animals in the back of the pestilent shop, just in case in the hand yields, when the flesh swiftly ring-around-the-rosy falls. 20 contrast between wounds and the mechanism a dove soared but I lost myself seeking stock doves. Right away I convened actually I was about to drink, and this time the lemon split into equal parts was growing in the tea-filled chamber pot. Rough the pillow when you can’t sleep, a rosette on the taut garter, garter belt; bottleneck of difficulties. To be in God’s hands I joined my hands in prayer, fingertips relaxed by an internal civic pressure. Either a God or a shadow: for the would-be sleeper it was all the same. Revoltment in the jungle of cobblestones or else clear waters and fresh shadows: the feedment of our chickens is customary, you don’t laugh if they shoot at you. Wanting to go all out, I settled on strict rations.    Ŧ 21 The sentinels beyond the bridges, sacro sanct duties impose tripled considerations: if you really are a crystal sky almost green or else tenacity confounds the eels, tenacity battling self-contradiction, yet another flight of mine to the outskirts of the illusion that I might conjoin with the azure rivieras, hardly tenacity, here’s what it is, not wanting you and having you in vain, darkly discouraging surveillances I receive you oh night in the crystalline hands that joined me separate. Separation and the self-distillation, of the herbs at the bottom of the jug a glimmer of voices and the eternal beyond a song roughed out with pride. In the evening I didn’t see any of the angels begging my forgiveness, arms heavier than air, wrath an impossible coordination of battles when the mouth of the river bore us off.    Ŧ Tender growths as dawn draws near tender growths of this anxiety or anguish that can neither love itself nor those who destroy me by making me exist. Most tender the emasculated night when from muffled sobs of the crossing of square with street I hear irreprehensible squeals, the careless mirth of the young who still know how to live if to fear is to die. Nothing can tear the youthful eye from so much disturbance so many streets on empty, the houses are undertows for untoward laughter. They taunt me now that the shutters with a solemn gesture patch other fears of even smaller men and if consoling myself that among the living there is still believing, I conjure up your taut and sallow face, with its hint of genius—it’s to feel in everything the crush of boredom of being disturbed for next to nothing.   Ŧ Notarized papers for the inflamed a red poppy ablaze as if it were your grotesque hopes I’d say if it weren’t that by doing so I seek enlightenment of the projects despite the obstacles inherent in your roughness. In the stone on the street the instance of unblemished objects if you misread them and in the girth of the street a tandem as well. In the modesty of enlightened subjects held sway pools of meager blood earth covered with undulating inkwells renaissance when you are broken.  22    Ŧ 23 One foot on the ground, then you lift your foot, then set it down and tardy the leg then the thigh and all in a quiet tinny roar you lower it and in the entwining your two legs touch ground. Then in the ground there’s tinned meat opening itself because I quickly whisper I want you. Then when I set down my foot you chance to catch sight of it floating quietly and the crystal shards poke through like scarce or droopy mushrooms, in the black wax. Then in the wax the uterus discharges and the uterus is then that horse, cantankerous, he always gets his way and then rides so gaily and then another tremor until he’s had his fill. Fingers and brain refusing to obey, the order from on high, the ambition controlled by your body, a grudging separation of the ink from your ambiguous hands. Gigantic dwarfs promising, glory to the merchant, a tickling of the passions, mane trespassed by a bracelet. Mane trespassed by passions an equal enchantment for your arms, so heavy with love. Then when it’s over he heads out and shadows are on the ground, all a loitering of empty forms ticing like flowers but then unraveling and the intestines at rest beg no, don’t close. Pricked by deception, a sterile deception, why did you make it? that sweet? Sweet the arrival of tidings steering you back on track in stead of the veterinarian. Then in the leg the door shuts and the door clears away the leftovers and the internal gurgling cries out cries out. We’ll go hungry yet another day, famine, the clock set for migraines as we’ll set off infamous, a promised land and forgotten then your famine. Surprised on the street corner, uncertain I swooned but pricked by modesty, I clenched my fists. If you know it hurts you why did you do it. Trespassed by the marching order, by the daring itself, if, instead, it wanted to take me out of action to tempt me, again if the demon overthrowing you doesn’t disappoint. Because everyone wrote. Spear that breaks a thud your placid rivulet. Spear that breaks a heart your thud.    Ŧ  24   Ŧ 25 Irony an even harder knee. You think think think and it’s the end. Of all your documents enchantments. While you lie I sneak off, along the lines of the mountain sonnet. Inkling inkling your gloves will never touch a living thing. The sonnet a barbarous thing. The headstone a match that while staging the great instance instantaneously disclosed itself a line of the future your hand and in your face, the unhappy mob of the parvenu, innocence that remained in you a pardon. The motorcycle a quarrel. The hallucination a lift to the graveyard. Doubtless its most distinguished representative. (The only thing I care about is not losing face with its appearances.) 26   Relief upon relief with the white coat extending brownly over the abyss, belief tattoos and telephones in a row, while awaiting the honorable Rivulini I unbuttoned. House upon house I telegraph, a spare bicycle please if the rest of you can find a way to push. Relief upon relief you push transitive my yellow bicycle, my smoking. Relief upon relief all the papers scattered across floor and table, hinting slickly that the future waits for me. The mob a pardon.  Relief upon relief, the white stripes the papers white a relief, passage upon passage a brand-new bicycle with bleach spraying the graveyard. Let the future await me! Let it await me let the biblical future await me in its scope, a twisted destiny I haven’t found making the rounds of the butcher shops.    Ŧ Ŧ 27 Sweetness of a glance and a possible lie to proliferate with hands open to all visions, open because I see you enriching the entire world my small world of so many cover-ups. And in the sweetest disinfecting of the overflowing days, and in our truest confiding that the road has ended closed to each shaking of the door I see you, exaggerating your stature in my mind, your shortcomings still unhoped for, to my stillhopeful eyes. Sweet chaos, a visionary sweetening carries me weary into your picture garden perfectly designed for liberty, for lust and for all things that together procure distention, from your evershifting face. Luminous the virtue of his mind plainly translingering it awaits the hour of absolute awakening, an entire nation seconding my plans! But Like one deaf you seem to pause uncertainly at the entrance, wire fence well-secured against your possible departure, and all around the gentle void seems to be thinking of something other than your return—seems, by expelling you, to infest you with some punishment—I don’t fall but am always the one dying piece by piece. And in this liquefaction of inclinations the plane of the park tips over, the wood-scent silences, and all about still brims the modest joy of being almost safe. on my mental plane it’s not inherent your bringing Babel to my eyes that saw so much between two devastated hills. I see the time, it’s one o’clock in my deadened mind, and you await the hours that follow on the heels of death. Death sure of its holdings nods yes, come—as I dispel every lingering and ceremoniously greet it. A poor creature death if in the hell of the wee hours it slumbers even in my arms.  28   From within this peaceful little park I see you leaving, your steps still slow, for another garden and I know that like rain I will wait until your figure has been resurrected whole from the graveyard of my penumbras, my thoughts.    Ŧ Ŧ 29 This garden that to my figurative mind seems to want to open tiny new horizons to my joy after last night’s storm, this garden is a bit white and maybe green if I want to color it and waits to be set foot in, charmless its placidity. A dead corner a life that descends without desiring the good into cellars brimming with significance now that death itself has announced with its decanting its own importance. And in the decanting a little dream insists on being remembered—I am peace it almost screams and you’ve forgotten my solemn shores! But it’s quiet the garden—paradise by a twist of fate, it’s naught what you seek beyond I who am renunciation, it announces to me, that firmament I sought A whispering peace, I found you engaged in making yourself scarce. It’s as if, in your void crowned with impudent umbilici, a true history were born truly faithful to your words. And in the engagement I find necessary to take up for your dwelling still a flower shakes, it’s my mind sickened by so many false solutions. Overturning stylistics, carrying off that hubbub of shrewd cars and returning promptly after supper I glimpse, in fact, your still-undusted kingdom, and still to come the bandage on your knee! at first sorrowful then wary in its self-creating.  30   Ŧ 31 To Braibanti In your large smoky hands, there remains a goodness that I don’t feel, as a rival, in the shadow that suicides you: meaning: let me not hear your desperate cry or the giant imaginary coupling, that is your guide. In your full suntanned lips I still see a light becoming subtle comment and irony, more deft your hand which speaks in turn, don’t be silent. Oh seeing the game of your destiny, I thank my destiny with open hands, to meet you and still meeting you, I find no nausea for my imperfect deliriums I find no love under your true light, I find no more perfect horizon than your hands. But in the madhouse there were those who competed, even for a dress, of clean, imaginary rags. Imagining your lost cause, in my gut I felt withheld tears that didn’t well up for you. And then, all clean, I set myself to write, these boring lines, so suicidal you were. And suicidal I remained: imaginary, turned toward sadness like an umbrella, which in its roundness parks my mind. I drew from it a handkerchief, hemmed in blue, that soared aloft, meeting up with destiny. Your destiny to speak softly always self-propelled or compelling, newspaper illustration, imperturbable. Your cause against the night was embroidered with intentionally libelous arabesques. You slept, then you awoke, rebellious as always, from a rebellion lucid but grotesque. And your books so well washed in their paraffin, trembled in your demented mind, illustrious desire for another end: your sojourn among the great. You were delirious, and I 32 readied myself to correct, that vice, imperturbable ending of your gargantuan day. A gargantuan newspaper: with little indentations in its print, inflections inflexible its manuscript. But in the eternal reiterating of things, objects, and paraffins there was also your presence, shifty, hawking papers. Stockstill I looked at you, visceral, betraying public opinion. Duties betraying me, imposed on me by chance, I shivered, maybe you were master. An unbending reed, perchance, and seven doors at the entrance of your magnificent castle. Maybe you were magnificent, enflamed, by a real case, magnificent in your bartering swallows for ants.    Ŧ The heart ponders: nothing can stop it from pondering “the heart is good,” I’m fed up with driving the rhinoceros. But if winning war is honor, glimmering, virtue’s fine precision (yawning) then conquering the heart is revenge! 33 BAD POETRY for YOU to S. So many people, and not all vain in me or oleographic. Trembling on your passageways, I plead for help or God, it’s all the same to my regurgitating senses, on the prow. And right at the commencing, new help extends, a window, ashen calls, on filth to help it. And I have only one complaint, that upon seeing your vision, you do not call or gaily flower about my perfumed body of guileless indolence.    for Massimo Ferretti With quick sure strokes: I bring you my celebration, my celebrating vain glory, in a spell cast by merchants and an industrious offspring. The giant bridges are dwarfs when I come down from my blessed roof, and advance, a most assured avant-garde—(more so among the plebes, a bit mysterious to us). But having found you—intent on polishing asphalts—I roll out of my bed, climb to the roof, and beat you up. Or else I stay up there, unsure whether to bless you or to possess you, in short promiscuously melded with the sky, that goatish as milk, promises nothing. Ŧ And it doesn’t promise to cripple you: or to clone you, it asks only for a rematch, and to disown you. It’s much easier for me to see your closed face than happily impose upon myself closed rules. And deceiving myself, or the others, I drill into the closed forms, and derive from them a closed harmony, to your verbum, to your mysticism unstoppable fist of dust.    Ŧ Without lamenting over winter, which bombards your eyebrows, I repudiate irony and stretch it out flat till dawn derives from it: scientific laws, for my growing vain annuity. 34 35 Maybe I’ll die, maybe I’ll leave you these poor trifles as a memento: don’t distribute any thoughts in the woods for the poor, but upon the rich, bestow all my blood. And my blood in rich rivulets refuses to be surprised: promiscuity with the neighbors or a woof in the woods. Clasp about me your flowered hand, depart for yet another case of bloodless flowering, I have never promised, permitted, my being the one who pines away. But on the trail of life there’s a battle of puppies, spectacular fan for my condolences. Once more tie the cart to my lips, which condescending to speak, strangle, the blood and the vision in an incest of smiles, promiscuity sly blemishes. So many reasons for my equivocal camouflage: a little womb breathing, a voice falling silent, and the neglected aspirin that remembers: death is a sweet companion, retiring you from aspirations. Dead I engage the traumatological line to house these words: write them on my lost grave: “this one can’t write, she dies roosting on the basket of undigested things her manias uncertain.”  36   Uncertain her expectations, and the flowers in mourning, admonish. Bombarded by a river of words, she argues, chooses a path, hardly a match for her dexterities, were there any to contribute to the great reformation of such tenacious thoughts. She puts her right hand on the wheel breaks it and deftly, embarks upon magnificent rivers.    Ŧ In purely human terms, as if his journey had been cut short, I told him: “don’t buttonhole friendship,” “it’s definitive.” If journeys bear no fruit, if they are fruitless, at least take off your shirt so I can see your sweat. And he answered me: “if a whole line is straight, clear, if the whole of my belonging is straightforward,” and I: “you’re not the only one on the straight snaking line, for it snakes back on itself, it kisses your hand.” And he replied: “but I head out in a huff, pointlessly reflecting on your words.” “They emaciate me.”—viaduct conducive to the madness of knowing you with me, but distant, unreachable, like the secret stabbing at the heart of things. They wither becoming sparser, repeated endlessly, in tight garland about your scanty brow. Ŧ 37 I inherited the grass, things, the hammers on your brow a tragedy turning ever grimmer. I inherited from the grass its grim color, it cuts the fodder in two. And it chisels, the future, before you conform to yourself (before you saved yourself ) I fell. You fall trembling, subjugated, by your immense brow. And with everything settled, she cried, a bit desperate in her cell, biochemical her reaction. I’m afraid I’m a little batty, she replied to the landlord—but what are you doing with the gun? I’m pushing it into its hole. And there was nothing other than fodder. Holed up I found two of them, chiseled with the master’s touch. Trembling, trembling troubles, little shining plates. And a shot fired transversally hitting the retinal screen, then he sank softly onto the couch, but was on the floor tiles red and gray.     Ŧ “And then I’m not the type to be a rancorist” and fleeing then she saw, ex-peasant that she was, one has to square accounts. She flees, would like to cry, or at least sit down for a bit, but “I’m not a rancorist” and she keeps all the slaver in her mouth.   Ŧ Beware the medusa: white slightly livid, the Giulietta Alfa Romeo heads past you, quarrels the golden silence and kindles in your faith a hope of disappointment. Without paradise we were, castrated, in the unknown faith in a tomorrow that doesn’t want to appear vain but shoots buds upon your sleeping-pill-addicted head. Strange this communion of thoughts, strange this equal sniffing of each other, strange this sleeping pill not pricking, overdoing it, deriving nothing from the lesson but satisfaction. (And as she descended the stairs pricking Bird shit on the windshield drops softly into the interruption of your dream. Liquefied you return to your duties, one intention less. her eye were the words “I love you my dear for settling everything.”)   38     Ŧ Ŧ 39 Two tigers in the garden: of slightly blackened copper of glass the living room, and your new science clings to the horizon, may you feel the need for it. And then the sentinel fires and flees, leaving you undesirable upon your couch. Then escape comes to mind, finding another scale to counteract the weight—of your entire length pulling you by the hair. There’s no solvent that doesn’t bicker: stretch out, reflect, and announce sad dawns, bashful sciences, pornographic photographs and even, in the hop of a bird little true things. Issuing devices you revive, stretched out with soft drinks—you overdo yourself, that living room letting you die, in an ill-starred glass that punishes you. How beautiful these poppies are. They spiritualize the grass, which grates cheeses from them. Rio Claro: mechanized center: flowers (with no names) extend a helping hand. It drizzles and saddened (if you are) extend an arm to the wind and the sparse rain. Then you feel deferred: they’ve whisked away all their breasts from the giantesses! Once again extend a helping hand to the umbrella, and extend a frugal foot to the earth, little sneezing monstrous dust. Don’t get caught without an umbrella: it’s raining like hell now that you’ve smelled the full scent of the flowers (if there were any).   40     Ŧ Ŧ 41 Complicity’s arches by the sea, Easter of the beautiful, arches of the cold in your personal Noah’s Ark: a frigid engloving body and soul: for a foal, fingertip ineffable affirmation of boredom, distension of the glove in the hand and thus a ball point useful in adjusting true things. Which would rather be sitting there indolently bathing, stretching coats-of-arms from your speech, they smooth it out and then display it to the public. What do they display? Your incongruities then a smack on the behind then another little thing: his heart identifying with wine. Lesbian smack, or good-for-nothing then another little sadness, your scissors, snipping, each inclination toward duty. (transparent sleepless your wetting the cat’s head, its tail, when its own heat drove it wild.)  42   I sell you my kitchen burners, then you scratch them and sit unprepared on the desk if I sell you the featherweight yoke of my infirm mind, the lighter my load, the happier I am. Undone by the rain and by pangs incommensurable menstruation senility drawing near, petrolific imagination.    Ŧ A cry in the mouth that not even tranquilizers can relieve completely isolated from its fellow thermic filth, homely virtue of sneezing, with an extra cast on the foot, your hunger of crystalline relaxations limps so badly, features of a smaller universe, a show of necessary feelings, small semblance. From the dead the order to depart, dozing in the last farewell—taking in God’s bounty with frank ease. Ŧ 43 We with a flat tire couldn’t bridge the distance with a yell and were swept away, unnecessary plan toward unattainable altitudes: with this craving for caresses, which shall never deflate your sails but exposes the hinges of a poverty that sniffing at its belongings spoke of no longer being able to walk. Dialogue with Poets From poet to poet: in sterile language, that appropriates benediction and makes of it a little game or gesture, slowing the pace over the river to let every truth be told. From poet in poet: like hawks, preying on the wind that carries them, helping to ameliorate hunger. Step upon step: a futile motive that boosts their spirits, seeing their reputations grow, the literati shirts open for a tan, under the sun of all tranquilities: one slight miscalculation and they’re borne into the hereafter, death descending, clutching them so tight. Ironically fake, or is there a grain of truth? that I can call yours also? But in the river of possibilities there sprang up also a little nocturnal star: my vanity, to be among the vanguard a giant of passion: a Christ-emblem of the renunciations. Announcing chastity, dilemmas resolvable and not, knowing how to parry the emblem from virile mouths, I learned you’d shot yourself with a bullet in the head: self-dominion if the hurricane roars in the night. Hurricane particle of such a vast dominion it furrows even your brow of unexistential shames. And at the stroke, I saw you again, dead on the floor, displaying nonsense, stretching your shirt to all four corners spitting conformist kicks toward the earth. 44 45    Ŧ Seeking an answer to an unconscious voice or through it thinking to find one—I saw the muses enchanting themselves, stretching empty veils on their hands not correcting themselves before the portal. Seeking an answer which would reveal, the orgiastic sense of these events the particular darkening of a fate opposing through brief bursts of light—the only sense the splendid gesture: not forgetting, letting the walls chafe the skin, notwithstanding estrangements and not revolting, against this wrong crushing and sobbing, which is my moon on my face the scent of angels on my arms, my step firm and not furtive: a slow but accomplished ruin: and not turning away from lowly things, writing them all down supine.    Ŧ If you want, I don’t know, if you can, relight the fuse terribly cold (cotton wool in the sky still a pearl) though saddened, raising to the sky mud-filled hands. To be able to rest in your heart, in your fire of spent embers, freely renouncing my freedom. Or to move you to pardon, losing the hour, that triumphant craves a hard heart, of flint, so menacing it loses the cause, the origins of ardor. To be able to dance with the hours, gaily anticipating sciences, without imprinting your face upon a stone. To be able to mortar with you the thousand stones, conjoined in a ring, which are thin ivy binding our eyes. To be able to castrate the desires, their purities unraveling into the river where the dancers of night-suicide orgiastically drift past. To be able to announce that desires aren’t absurd, but true song, a flea in the ear act of love, or else the true word rising in your heart.    Ŧ Attempting a solution: even if it’s only death undivided from your ascending, sun.  46   Ŧ 47 Hope born free of disappointments what unhoped-for joy is then this crazed match of mine in air that whinnies for oxygen and taints unfathomable bonds? Bloodied all over his overalls seem incorrigible from a cultural perspective. Fortified by hope make the best of things, in the field of cocoa and low-hanging leaves. Acknowledging his cowardice, he strikes the prize on the table, and from countless realities, picks one. Chocolate whinny you open my veins to the smell of painkillers rushing and filling, my blood with blue bubbles.     Ŧ Inexplicable or exemplary generous and trite you let yourself indulge a few old habits. Raptus seated, at the Piccoli Angioli Bar, near the Fountain of the Virgin, who today happens to be me.   Ŧ Loving you and unable to stop loving you, inconvenience I endured once and once only, only to backslide. Enduring yourself you invited: speaking more clearly, lacerating the air with obtuse little shouts, then disinfecting the air itself, and calling it love too, so much it parted you from my arms consumed with envy, from my secret tantrums, from your inclined face which never blamed or only somewhat, my bustling the mind’s clocks around your body. Quivering tongue in one’s mouth, a wing-beat that is language. One felt then the need to raise, pyramids to the truth (or to setting it in motion).  48   Ŧ 49 Loving despite dullness, contempt born and dead, loving for the whole long road leading to the field where you carefully saved the yellow coins, which spoke of other quarrels of other usuries, of other enchantments all of them transplanted in a single being clinging to a tree. And tenacious you invited: and tenacious I warded you off; the dance of the embroidered hems the stitchery so marvelous that it was not for us to rumple it with our second-rate caresses. It was not for us to come to terms, it was not for you to decide if that woolen yarn really led to that hut. There is only shadow around the hut, only dead mounts and voids around my secret only you with your glance can foresee this loneliness querying to return again, dead upon the prey. In the chamber there was the scent of incense, filtering from the church silent mother who did not deny that you might appear to me: squalid vision in the scarce hours, vision and refrain, spurned by your insidious hand. In the chamber you were lying on the bed so narrow as to be my mate, while you fared anything but close, in a house of bordellos closed only to me. You lived in the very air! and it was a self-querying, this silence, that dragged oblivion throughout its sentences. In the small cramped house you appeared, impossible visitor: to preordain my day, to tell me to come to terms. I wish I’d left you in the field! smiling you stretched your hand to the clouds and then hurled yourself into the depths.      Ŧ Ŧ But you wouldn’t return: you lay down half dead in a field of wheat, waiting for the sky. I took you home, I sowed you throughout the olive groves, I pushed you into the ravine, and then, seeing you were dead, I came to terms. 50  And dying for you is vain: but still more vain this dissembling a semblance of vitality when you ran me out of the village, twinned your eyes. 51 Still more vain this wish to be for others other than Christian; a guide in effect or one guided, a stone or a thud, a mine or its dust. Even vainer to fancy themselves bearers of good tidings, of one of life’s triumphs, even vainer being, under extreme conditions the expert sailor. I feel so lonely, and I love you so, the wind sinks its teeth into the countryside, pamphlets flying into my eyes, and each and every hailstone says: “you’re not one of us.” The rest of us laugh at the storm, you dupe the chickens with your tears, acquired on the cheap, your invoking the word love. If life is lacking in courage: it’s our belief in ourselves, that robs us of it—courage can’t suffice, to ease the pain, to halt incurable unsolvable diseases. (And I point my pen toward a clear sky, that sails far-off warily indifferent, lest you fall.) And I become the other one again, the older one, who kept me company, as child and as adult, that other one the old one, who knew how to savor the mystery of your dark and yellow eyes, changing with age, lakes at first, narrows now. Square clouds watch us and sigh: one gaunts oneself, believing in rejuvenation mumbling maledictions. Peace on earth will be yours, if you ignore us, if you extract from the miracle, mere semblance. Wanting to say: you moor me, the wind roars in the storm a fish, changes colors, because the sparse rain caresses it, in the scent-filled air, cats spring forth, fur on end, they know what you know. The dead bless the soul, and then cart it off to the nearest graveyard. And seeing him now, I wonder, how to keep loving, knowing him foreign to your every gesture, moored to his sweep, my own lacking urgency, and you with the crust of winter, that you bless, from afar.    Ŧ Latin his eye, his sweep both glitter with a broom I sweep away the debris, which was that soul of mine I call love before you undid it. You’ve beaten it back into its den and it doesn’t dare utter a word that’s not the mockery of its own virtues. 52 53    Ŧ My head pounds, in the pensione, wash the pangs (manias), so I can’t love you anymore for I’m locked in my unease, or disaster that appears once a year, adumbrating dreams of caresses. A girl I was, and I dreamt of you, attending dances shorn of desire. Now it’s the flame that like a tongue, unites, beyond many incinerated mounts. You dance, monster of the bearlike eye, and I trap you, in the faded bed. You stamp your being, in rivulets of feigned innocence. A feeble little voice: it’s enough to crack open the shutter of the tiny window, to change the world and its semblances are all one with your migraines. Enough to crack open, open, your sleep measures itself against the sky, of which remains a tragic likeness. You open a wall: another appears, to take your pulse. Brushing against the wall you can’t, don’t want to save those few hours of the spirit for yourself, to constrain these its mysterious cells. You’re left to feel like a leaning pine in the midst of new pines straight course toward rotted piety.    Ŧ And now I muster for you, in the dead woods, a complicitous smile as well.  54   Ŧ 55 You don’t remember my golden beaches, if as I suspect pernicious you lean over the balcony, without seeing anything outside your mind, which has trouble writing anything good. Otherwise with each gust of wind you’d be there, at the hanging, enriched by your strata of richest metaphors. And then you see the blue sky, tinging itself to spite you it too leaning over, assisting you, awaiting you while you embroider with the muse, other little tricks or shipwreck. And it’s sweet shipwreck in this sleep so possessed, and it’s sweet not thinking of else but the mania of seeing, touching, hearing sniffing your undivided rest. Then you touch your foot, bring it to the olfactory, you take it in your hand and you move closer, at a sign on the segment rising upon the rocks, which concealing the houses make a stronghold, for your little town that diverts itself almost innocently, you’ve raised the bull so long. And you push it, your foot, toward an open door, and you give your greetings to the ladies (you don’t shake hands with the male). And then you redescend, along empty squares through no-man’s-land, alleys widened by the rain, which you don’t see so dry is the sky unescorted you still descend, by your side the hour that’s a mixture of fate and of your making from each sob one more existence. Light falls upon your head uncertainly, but I see you all the same; believe in me may I always see you the same way. The light now no longer descends very clearly upon your uncertain brow, its landscape is all mine. You have golden light in your elusive eyes they cannot reverse your fate beneficiated by my loquacious gaze the morning when I met you, dancing, near that bedside of yours. Near that bedside of yours wept the mother and it was I who watched you clamp your eyelids shut. By fits and starts you almost revive, with medicinal herb in hand, I’d like to pay you back for the pain I suffered at your bedside dancing in the morning when I was sleepy for your heavy eyelids that refuse to raise themselves to the dance. But you don’t dance instead you lie stretched out on the hospital cot where we met it was a polite kissing of the hand.   56     Ŧ Ŧ 57 At times your head assumes a guise decidedly perverse: there’s a new glint in your eye that leads one to surmise new facets of your illness. I lay my hand on the air that separates us as if I could touch all that unripeness: you don’t see it, you’re too touched by your illness. I don’t withdraw my hand; I leave it there suspended as if there were a void to disobey, and often I see it transforming itself that soul of yours you detest enlarging. A stillborn gesture; it never changes that head of yours done up with special glasses as if it were cause for celebration your feeling ill. I step back, I no longer nurse the slightest desire to enchant you; in your illness you’re a zebra moving, taut in its preserve. Naked words on the tree trunk, naked I sit above you, pure the intention, the exegesis doesn’t call for other exegetes. Enough that it issues from your call, life doesn’t expose itself in corollaries without cause. You have flames in your mouth and you’re the moon itself, you have an eye in your mouth to purify this sob, that calls you, by the letters of your name. I’ve laid your name inside a heart that wraps itself around a trunk, the bark clings to you instead, and the mountain doesn’t cross you. The impure gesture seems to touch on heedless ends; your name rests coupled with nothingness I lay you inscribed in the tough bark, and you keep your vow.    Ŧ I lay my hand to the side, I see specially the quickening of lights and lanterns on your face; it’s too late by now and you can’t aspire to the good.  58   Ŧ 59 Naïve houses, it’s best that God remain unknown, the taste of glass is like plastic, no scent is as strong as incense and the foot discomposes into equal parts. Dulled by tranquilizers writing, of things unknown as is best, to venerate secretly to penetrate. Penetrating under the pretense of being exposed, one raises that which lies low: cut with ill. And the ill discomposing into equal parts wrote these octogenarian lines. your motive not to scream, before the cathedral; exile or chance don’t forgive you, the locomotive. I’m quite unprodigal with kisses, you choose in me a flayed rose. Without thorns but the petals, in closing urge. My motive not to dream, before unwitting truth. My motive not to close, before the settling of accounts. You choose in me a motive undisclosed before the rose unpaired.       Ŧ Ŧ Accustomed to dreams, to sleep, to sun advancing shorn of glory, a clicking of heels upon the flagstones. Then enchanting with the same old farce the scion of a living line who scatters his greetings upon inferiors living it up. Who strews about with chaste solicitude his command: don’t curse at the fair. 60 61    Ŧ Spring, spring in spades your twisting canals, your pine groves dream of future flings, you’re not nearly as afraid as I am, of winter when the wind shivers. You resemble me: who between one death and the next breathes a sigh of relief but it doesn’t bother me: or does it? your seeming agonized in the midst of laughter. You snatch branches from the horticulturists, sow hardship in my soul (that so lovely stays upon its knees), you show me that everything that has an end has no end. And people curse: are even fiercer of you than of the space that consumes you carrying you into my arms. And I clasp a pale mummy that doesn’t smell at all: seeds issue from its eyes, plaints, commas, remedies and you don’t carry the mountain into the house and you can’t fructify, these sisters who keep vigil over you. Or else you consider vanishing, sly one hidden by a rain cloud too heavy to be believed. You seem in fact like a corpse in its housing and there’s nothing left for me to do but drive nails into its face. But my plaint, or rather a fatigue that can’t find its way back to shelter deranges the leaves, that yesterday I mistook for needs, likewise caresses and which now scatter my ardor.    Ŧ It’s life I crave, decanting the praises of even these beaches, or mountains, or streams but I don’t know how: you’ve killed your grain in my throat. 62 63 The field stands out clearly, and the sky (trash-colored) reflowers in the heights, permitting you ennui, silences, and playful internal laughter, while the sun digs in. In the evening a keen wind starts up rebellious by nature, but humbly employed in sweeping my eyes of fleas. Evening awaiting that I be less brave, that I still raise my eyes to all this serenity which not once has made the headlines as dangerous virgin. But in my closet I store good things made friable by the sight of these dormant mountains giving their all to my memory of hunger. I’ve also got a sadness in the knee that unbends with every stroll but infidel begs pardon and also constancy. It sits and faints, haven’t you pulled up stakes yet? And purgatory    Ŧ In the evening the sky roams, a poor thing it is through the window its gray (though it was green) undulating. Or else colors I never thought to reconquer barked darkly at the windowsill. If this dark virginity cannot rid the heart of its psalms then there’s no peace for the one who unstitches, night and day, trite things from his lips. It’s not the house (stitched with tiles) that guides you; it’s the disintegrate mystery of the ariel façade that subtly promises you bliss.    Ŧ is not so rebellious that it doesn’t attempt to wear widow’s weeds again in order to find out it’s not in vain this loving, rashly. 64 65 You with all your heart are frightened of air shaking you and losing you: down along the illiterate façade dreams are freed, large drops of blood that you count as they gush down upon the hands withdrawn in the anguish of knowing where the air is what it stirs why it speaks, of such watered-down wrongs as to appear, so many things rolled together but not one forgets that dragging of yours through boundless days night and blood.    Ŧ So many people, and not all are in me bliss or surfaces, you comb your hair while digging orbits from their sky. Looming over your enchantment the wolf of the she-weres, below the house conceals its white splendor obfuscated by prisons, those gilded imaginative beaches or else low-cut shrubs while trees disappear in the darkness the night in your distance your dreaming ashen horrors, while in the den the cubs awaken. 66 Descending from the sky a light as well meaning I don’t snap to it in the belief that in the pitch black there are lizards for your love. The sky responds to such a chaste intention of being enlarged reveals its thumb or strikes it in vain, earth lays down its pillow on which you slept when I dreamt of you selling lights to the teats that await your arrival. The night brings no reproaches I stay out of it while I await you you who cannot come into the stable I start to understand. (The moon counterfeits its own design to enlarge you while you sleep and in vain you wait for other bliss to be within your reach.)    Ŧ 67 There is wind still and all efforts fail to keep the clearing firm in its resolve. I hear the tinkling of the grass, it cannot, love itself. Save by unleashing fragrances into the air, disobeying nature. Rocks hatch snakes that right this dawning idyll.    Ŧ Face in the grass you smell what little there is to smell. You’re tired want to sleep, but cannot. The jagged rocks assume sardonic poses. Death is in the air. For now it eludes you. When you return to the pensione you kneel down. Trailed by flies, believing I was about to faint, I found you on the other side of the mountain, whose incline followed my inclinations, to be the perfect citizen. Flies trailing me, perfected the mission to the good—I awoke, tormented by tormenting doubts, whether to come or to have, peace in justice. Flies didn’t appear to doubt the state of my anxiety, and doubtful they buttonholed. Still trailed by flies, returning home I saw the tiny window, leaning from the row of empty houses. Peace then in that little room! here an animal can live quite well: I see ancestral gods from the rooftop. And the bands of the town, costumed in red and blue instruct: there’s a justice gnarled like a branch, flies had believed Or would like to. But cannot. they could repent me.    Ŧ  68   Ŧ 69 Diana the huntress was wont to draw near these woods, irremediably lost to her, who in the hunt sported with words. If I move there’s someone who slides a foot in front of me and devises for me a trap of images elemental. If I stir the skyline also undergoes mutation. Words plummet down to the valley they remember my three arches. The parallel of my steadiness doesn’t step aside if I shout in the pass the rocks dig orbits. Diana hunted: a heart Children own this town there are no robberies only spells transformed into urgent purchasing and selling, a bit of wool for pungent feet, and a thick mattress for the slope. There are only women in widow’s weeds, old lullabies and the wish to be fellow citizens, like the rest. There are no widow’s weeds in town at all only turbaned women or other apishness children playing with a harp, fingers tight around a branch.  dug three orbits, one in the eye the others withered upon my lips. Words are puzzled animals, they’re a glut on the market no sooner had I signed the check than they flew away from me. Diana drew the arrow; words fell, fly through the valley. I move, catch them again, wont to sport them in my eyelet after the hunt.  70     Ŧ A sweating rock: I tried all the steps; unsure whether to wash my hands of it or to obey you, while you painted grim punishing angels. A cloud reaches you, makes of you a hidden pasture, you’re within, the sea of flat plains, lingering smells, the mist risen to the sky. And queen believe me by now I’m painfully aware of your indifference, when all the while this sea of clouds reaches the summit. Ŧ 71 Grim mist, nothing else around but suffocated silence, by little lesions in the heart that hides but doesn’t pray, being dead. They’re cooking down below: food for the workmen, those obedient ones, I myself secretly savage, swallowing my own words no sooner uttered. Mist or haze or cloud, the lines of the future don’t cross this line—which is oil on the wound, brink that releases you and the silencing forever needs put aside tidied for another life.    Ŧ All the doors closed: but I see you, snatching a fate for me; it’s my dreaming that you open the doors. Then I can’t see you at all: I wake up holding your good cause in my hands, a chamoised flower struggles to be born. Instead death and solipsism, enriched by your remembering me, errant on the golden plain, it really is a dream your saying that you’re here with me. Am I reborn? Do I graze on the grass? You instead remote from every crude cause fail to appear and the ominous forests are mine alone. Soul remembers and augments body laments. Maybe you’ve given for my life a vain propulsion. I’m so far from having you better me in your hands. 72    Ŧ You don’t live among these plants that twine themselves around this vaseless foot of mine, and you can’t muster in your line any song for these my sterile lines now that you don’t draw your tightened lips to this my shaded body. You don’t appear to clarify the mystery of your non-presence, you don’t incite the circlet of flowers about my wrist, broken because I can’t hold you near me. Even the moon has a merciful slope but you don’t hook tight threads to my hand which so far away can’t lift the weights from your head broken by sobs. I fear my presence wreaks havoc upon our occasions, now that you don’t revive the horizon. I’m afraid of seeming strange, confused in bleating this incomprehension. I’m afraid of laying barren vines across your scarlet foot. I receive no other sip from your parched lips but this my impious mystery, the day’s boredom split into a thousand shards.    Ŧ 73 You weren’t dead; you were only alive to moisten my lips with supplicant alms, to lay out frugal lies in the Bergsonian manner upon my living crystalline permissiveness, while you ate a horse’s horseradish. You weren’t alive; you were only dead, after so many ill-timed battles in the soporific spirit. I wasn’t sleeping; I only searched for clamorous unions between lost souls who finding themselves in a tavern drowsed off to the sound of the carillon—quite a dauntless idea, but not a prophecy, not a pardon, not a word, new, sweet or merciful—just an engagement for seas undone by boredom, just a race for the pleasure of being sterile, just a tavern for the evening’s boozing, while toying with the heart you spat large fringes in my face.    Ŧ Around this body of mine held by a thousand shards, I run crushing grapes, hissing like the summer wind that hides; around this aged body that hides itself I draw a veil of swamps over plunging cliffs, settling then, on terms. Around this body of a thousand swamps, around this unsettled mine, around this vase of unfulfilled caresses, I never saw anything but fish enlarging, becoming other than themselves, other than an uncontrollable anguish of becoming, other than themselves in the arcadia of a literary world that fortifies itself chasing cheeses; feeling besieged, at vacuous dinners by uncontrollable instincts of predominance: ragged children who stretched other limbs clean as sleep, in vacuous mines.  74   Ŧ 75 Notes rising abysmal from the fringes of passions shrunk to the point of seeming veracious. And then with a knife I divide them and decant them, believing I’m a fierce beast at the fair. And then with the other side of the knife I finish off their edges afraid that a new melody will issue forth to irremediably compromise my sleep. Seeking in the last shreds of evening a hiding place less suited than this one that stimulates my reflexes in long obligatory naps. Or finding in the tenderly streaked grass an obligatory cruelty the day that you fixed your eyes on the spring furrow enchanting a world of beasts with glassy tears that didn’t fall but became embroiled in your so rosy sleep. And no new confusion is born of this but an alternation of exaltations depicting the hand scented with summer again believing itself a fierce beast at the fair. Seeking in sleep which yields some ill-placed comfort a frail shadow which was our youth lost to hardships, when you would gild the book of hours. I don’t remember which note awoke in me that lament of hearing within many voices, the pitiful ones, while singing along with the ABC’s I glimpsed soup pouring from your eyes. Music though does its part and in the understanding of it dwells my passion, that in its contortions depicted itself equally frightened by the mourning of its big eyes and its song.  76   Ŧ 77 Afterword Writing an afterword to a book instead of an introduction emphasizes a reader’s “choice and right to a fresh first impression,” as Amelia Rosselli herself once pointed out in an essay. In presenting the work of such an extraordinary and surprising poet, we felt this “choice and right” essential to preserve. Although well known in her lifetime, it is only recently that Rosselli, “poet of exploration” as she once described herself, has been recognized as one of the major European poets of the twentieth century. The daughter of Carlo Rosselli, an antifascist Italian philosopher of Jewish descent, she was born in Paris in 1930. In 1937, when Rosselli was only seven years old, her father and her uncle were killed by the fascists. After the Nazis invaded France, her family fled first to London (Rosselli’s mother was English and, like her father, an antifascist activist) and then to the Larchmont, New York, where they lived for six years—a time she recalled with great fondness as among the happiest in her life. At the end of the war, Rosselli relocated to London before moving to Italy for the first time in 1948, initially living in Florence before settling permanently in Rome. In 1996, she took her own life. The tragedy of her father’s death (and the loss of her mother when Rosselli was only nineteen) was central in her autobiography, defining her and her writings in many different ways: from her trilingual and cosmopolitan upbringing (although she preferred the word “refugee”), to her political engagement—as with many other Italian intellectuals of the postwar years, she was a member of the PCI, the Italian Communist Party—and deep social consciousness. Discovered by the writer, poet, and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, one of Italy’s leading intellectuals of the time and her first critic, Rosselli published Variazioni belliche (War Variations) in 1964, the first of her eight collections of poetry (one, Sleep, she wrote in 78 English). In 1980, she published Primi scritti (First Writings), a collection of her early poems and short prose compositions written in Italian, French, and English, the result of her plurilingual experience. Even though Rosselli would eventually choose Italian over French and English—in the same way as she would opt for the Italian citizenship inherited from her father—her poetic language is a trilingual hotchpotch, a constant drift from one tongue to the next. As she declared in an interview: “Mine is a ‘trilingual language’ with which I had to fight in order to choose the language in which I wanted to write, and the country I wanted to live in, simultaneously.” Serie ospedaliera (Hospital Series) is Rosselli’s second book and was published in Milano in 1969. Rosselli wrote much of it in the mid-1960s after being hospitalized for a mental illness she suffered from for most of her life, and whose pain shapes her language and difficult vision. Thus the title suggests a certain “resignation” compared to the “bellicosity” of her first collection. In both cases, the “variations” and the “series” insinuate her musical training (Rosselli was both an accomplished musicologist and a musician, having studied the violin, piano, and organ), which also inspires the metric structure of her poetry. In her remarkable essay “Metric Spaces,” published as an appendix of War Variations, Rosselli, emulating the traditional Italian sonnet, gives shape to a highly innovative metric system, whose ground component is the word, any word—given that any word is a sound and as such they all hold the same value—and where the blockish stanzas suggest the geometric shape of a square. To this end, for Hospital Series Rosselli asked the publisher to use an IBM font, where each letter takes up the same space, as the font most appropriate for reproducing her verses’ cohesiveness. On the cover of that first edition we see a series of squares one inside the other viewed from above as a reversed pyramid. In sharp contrast with the consistency of the prosody and the graphic disposition is the explosive language of these poems, a 79 furious cacophonic crescendo of semantic and syntactic accumulations where rhythm, intrepid enjambements, grammatical virtuosity, puns, audacious associations, and hammering anaphoric repetitions express the humor of an author who is having fun manipulating the language. However, underneath the blustery flow of words, there is a profound and raw realism that never loses track of the reader who is constantly in play, engaged in an intriguingly combative dialogue between an “I” and a “you”: “If journeys bear /no fruit, if they are fruitless, at least take off your shirt /so I can see your sweat.” Roberta Antognini 80