[LOIS SHELTON] I'm Lois Shelton, the director
of the Poetry Center.
I'd like to speak for [AUDIO SKIPS] gentlemen
about the little flyers that were handed to you.
[SOUND OF PAPER MOVING] I'll get there in a minute.
I'll just hold it.
This may be the last event that we have in this pleasant place
because the Poetry Center library, which
is on the corner, is due for demolition in January,
and we had thought until just--
I mean June.
I wish it were January.
We had thought, until just recently,
that this space and our little guest house
were going to be saved.
Now we've been told that these buildings are to--
both to be destroyed and that this space is
to be used for a parking lot.
So we urge you to write letters in support of the Poetry
Center.
We're mainly concerned with the long-term goals,
that we get a permanent home before too many years pass.
And the main problem, as I see it,
is the fact that, in the little house we're being moved to,
which will be a very pleasant place when it's renovated--
because of the design of the building,
we will only be able to shelve about half of our books.
Our collection is incomparable.
There are many fine collections in university libraries
but nothing that compares with ours,
mainly due to its accessibility to the readers.
University of New York at Buffalo
has a wonderful collection.
You have to put on white gloves, and pass through inspection,
and handle everything in plastic.
Here you can take a book down and hold it in your hands.
And we would like your support, so if you can write letters
to Dr. Koffler, or Dr. Kosanovich, or Dr. Biegel,
or to the editor, anyone you choose.
We would appreciate it very much,
and we'll be happy to talk to you about it after the reading
because I don't want to take up Paolo's time.
We are so happy that he was able to come.
And I would like to introduce Jonathan Beck, who
is the department chairman for French and Italian,
who will introduce Dr. Valesio.
[JONATHAN BECK] How does this work?
[SHELTON] It's on.
[BECK] You just hold it?
[SHELTON] Yeah, and we'll put it around Paolo's neck.
[BECK] We'll put it around your neck.
[SHELTON] We'll hang Paolo with that.
[LAUGHS]
[BECK] I don't have that much to say.
Most of you who are here will have already received
this great flyer announcing this reading,
and it has in it the principle works of Paolo Valesio.
If you haven't received one, you're here anyway,
and so all of the distinguished things that we put in here
were to get to come.
If you'd like a list of those afterwards, we have a few left.
I did want to take a couple of moments
at this occasion to announce officially
our project, a proposal, a very ambitious proposal, which
I will just simply summarize for you, read the main points of it
to you by way of introducing Professor Valesio.
Basically what this is a--
this is the result of Professor Valesio's visit
here at the University of Arizona
as distinguished visiting professor
in the fall of this year.
In the course of our discussions and in the course of his
becoming familiar with the University of Arizona
and especially the facilities in poetry and creative writing,
the idea emerged of creating a program, a new program, which
will eventually bear the name of the Arizona Writing Laboratory
for Italian and Italo-American writing.
Now, our good friends in the University Foundation,
the U of A Foundation across the street,
are at work, probably not at this very moment,
but they are at work with us in trying to put together
this joint project which will involve
French and Italian department, the Poetry
Center, and the Arizona program in creative writing.
Lois mentioned a few minutes ago one
of the unique features of the Poetry Center here,
in the way the library works.
Our proposal begins with a similar kind of comparison.
And I won't take too much time.
I'm only going to read you a couple of sentences
here just to give you an idea of what this is.
And then after the reading, I'd like
to give any of you who are interested in knowing more
about this a chance to get more information.
I'd like to--
I'd be happy to talk to anybody who is interested in how
this is about to proceed.
Unlike institutions where endowed chairs
of Italian studies lack specific focus,
Berkeley, Columbia, Connecticut, Stanford, our Arizona proposal
is to establish a center for Italian creative writing
and applied criticism directed by Paolo Valesio, who
would be the first appointment to the chair as Professor
of Italian and Comparative Literature
and Author in Residence.
Briefly, the center would entail courses in composition
and rhetoric, courses and workshops at all level,
would do translation, theory and practice of translation,
applied criticism and essay writing,
and then have a number of advanced seminars, workshops,
and master classes as well as writing clinics
in poetry and short fiction, also media writing, cinema,
theater, radio, and TV, and would include the participation
of visiting authors.
And here we have, in parentheses,
for example, Umberto Eco, in the inaugural year.
Hopefully, the inaugural year could be as soon
as next year, 1990.
If that is not feasible, we hope to make the inaugural year
as soon as possible after 1990.
And again, anybody who is interested in knowing more
about this, I'd be happy to speak
to you during the reception.
Now, without any further delays, it
is a great pleasure-- this is a day that Lois, and I,
and a number of us in the department
have been waiting for a long time.
I have the pleasure to present Paolo Valesio
in a reading of his own work.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
[PAOLO VALESIO] Can you help me get--
[BECK] This is like a robing ceremony.
Why don't you step forward a little?
[SHELTON] I'm going to go get you some more water.
[BECK] Actually, we have a--
[VALESIO] I have to stay in back of this.
[BECK] How about to his shirt collar?
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
[WOMAN'S VOICE] Yeah.
Yeah, he's going to want to sit here, he said.
So--
[BECK] You're on a short cord.
[VALESIO] I have had already the honor of listening to a poetry
reading at the Center, and I noted that professional nature,
which, in the case of poetry reading, means,
it seems to me, that the poet speaks
very little as a professor or expository of his own writing.
So I want to have any preface at all
but just start with the actual reading with only one note,
that I'm here in front of you today
at the mercy and hazard of translation.
I mean, only one volume of the three published until now
and the two that are in preparation of my poetry
has been fully translated, and only some of my latest poems
have been translated.
So I will read the translated ones,
not because they are in some sense more important
than the others but because they are available in translation.
That's what I meant by the hazard element.
I won't an inflict an Italian poem on you
because it would make the whole thing slower
and more complicated, with one exception.
I take the liberty to say goodbye to Italian,
so to speak, for the next of the 40 minutes,
take the liberty of reading in Italian the poem you have--
some of you, at least, have read in the flyer
and without reading the translation.
And then I will go into a series of poems in translation.
It's a poem about two squirrels which in Italian are called
scoiattoli-- it may sound funny, but squirrel also sounds pretty
funny in Italian--
on a tomb.
And it's called-- and this is neither Italian nor English--
"In Memoriam."
"Due
scoiattoli grigi, immobili.
Uno è esattamente inarcato su una cresta di lapide grigia.
L'altro lo fissa, stanno per balzarsi alla gola,
o è la pace di uno stemma?
Acquattato allo stremo della stessa tomba ferrigna.
Ai nostri passi incerti, sospetti del peccato della
curiosità, che ricercano l'Angelo di pietra,
bianca e rugosa, quattro grandi e neri crocidando si levano
lenti fuori dai non-cipressi."
I will go on with this in memoriam theme
for a little while in that I'd like
to read you my the last thing I wrote,
which is a rather long prose poem,
in memory of the significant Italian poet who suddenly
died a few months ago.
I think this reading will serve two purposes, one, to read
some recent work of mine in translation, and the other,
to avoid any temptation that arises when one speaks out
of a foreign language and literature
to present oneself as the heir of the whole tradition
like Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio.
That's certainly not my intention.
So much more concretely and modestly,
I think this prose poem will work, hopefully,
as a prose poem and also say something about Italian poetry
just in these days, in these months.
The way I organized it is like a series of flashes
or images in a movie.
There are a series of places and a description of moments
in which there was some meeting, or encounter, or conversation
with a poet who died.
And the title is, "In Memory of Adriano Spatola,"
who is the poet in question.
"Somewhere in Bologna in the '60s,
a group of young men and women aspiring towards the lucid calm
of scholarship and erudition.
Did we find this calm in the end?
It is hard to say when hindsight simply
means recognizing that we did not leave behind our enduring
perplexities.
Now most have become professors.
Some are expatriates.
One killed himself.
I was seated around one of the most refined humanists
at the university in that pre-demagogic era in which it
was not yet impossible to have university rhyme with dignity.
These were times of greater poverty, surely, or greater
simplicity of mind, times in which time
itself appeared so often misty.
But it was a sweet mist, that all the images and memories
screen are a shade of sepia.
A handsome young man began to take part in our reunions.
He had a smooth cupid's face, soft hair, delicate voice.
He had just founded a small literary journal whose name
was refined version of Babylon.
It was called Bab Ilu.
He spoke what was a rather new language then.
In our Italy, where the alignment
with the left on hard positions seemed at the time
the only credible alternative to the established conformism,
it was the language of pacifism.
I wanted to become more acquainted
with that poet and his magazine, but I was already preparing
to leave for the United States.
He was one of the many that-- what is the expression--
I lost sight of, whose inside I lost.
Adriano Spatola.
August 29, 1978, Sydney, Australia.
I see Spatola once again for the first time after the period
in Bologna in a pub in Sydney during an international poetry
reading.
Cupid has become a Viking.
He has gained weight.
His hair and beard have grown long.
A certain darkness has come over his face,
overshadowing the viciousness that one otherwise
would be tempted to connect with the exuberance of his actions
in performances, such as the poetry number he was engaged
in that night, which was already and would remain his trademark,
a sound poem made up of only two words and French words at that,
"Aviation / Aviateur," words that were recited, chanted,
whispered, shouted, mumbled, gargled,
smothered, discarded, and recovered, and dragged with him
along the floor, and on the platform,
and behind the piano where the performer grunts and grumbles
as he plucks the nakedness of the chords
under the raised top.
His success is enormous and well-deserved.
Adriano Spatola has been for some time now the most
interesting experimental poet and the purest coordinator
of poetry in Italy.
His Tam Tam, Journal of Poetry, On Poetry, and Total Poetry,
founded and directed by him, begins
to roll on the million fields.
But it also spreads his sounds, the voice of new poetry,
throughout the rest of the country.
After his trip to Australia, Spatola returned to his roots,
to the area of Parma, where the town we chose to live in still
retains the name of an old mill, a mill that
grinds only poems, fortunately.
This is why I called him purist.
This is not a mix that contains the devil's brand of ideology.
I also returned but to my un-roots in New England.
The preceding year, I made a crucial decision
to alternate narrative prose, with which
I had begun my writing activity, with poetry.
The reaching glance of another poet, Roberto Roversi,
had caught the moment in which so many impulses, desires,
and intuitions became coagulated into a commitment.
He looked at me with dark eyes inside his bookstore
of rare books in Bologna and said, you must write poetry.
Once, an old Sufi, curled up under the sun,
mending his coat, which was one big patchwork,
turned to a young man who was walking up and down
the other side of the street and was looking at him
with a mixture of condescension and curiosity.
Hey, I have sewn your heart in here,
he said, pointing to the spot where his thick needle was
sinking inside a patch whose color was particularly
offensive.
The young man followed the thread.
He became a mystic and disciple.
Similarly, Roversi revealed to me
the desire that was nested within me, to serve poetry.
However, it was the Australian encounter which definitely
sealed my commitment.
It was rather easy to follow Roversi--
he was about 15 years older than I-- as a maestro.
But to recognize the masterly presence and the lessons
behind the offerings of a man who was two years younger
than I, Adriano Spatola, required a gesture of humility,
which became the decisive act.
And the vast difference and almost incompatibility
between these two maestri mirrored
one of the many fertile paradoxes of life in poetry.
There was, nonetheless, one thing in common
between these two poets.
They were born as poets in Bologna,
thus no matter how differently their roots branched out,
they were both nourished by my native soil,
humility once again.
After prolonged expatriation and cosmopolitan existence,
my small provincial town had determined what
was most important for my path.
December 1979, Bologna.
The living room of an apartment with Christmas decorations
can be seen, a small tree with some ornaments already
sprouting and others lying here and there,
a certain sad, dismantled feeling in the air.
Perhaps this air always circles about
during official celebrations.
Adriano looks like Santa Claus, not the unbearable Kris Kringle
but the ancient Santa Claus, snowy,
forested with memories of paganism.
We talk about my collection of poems,
the first, which is about to come out, dedicated to Roversi.
During the conversation, Adriano makes
a couple of sarcastic remarks.
I reply in kind.
He answers angrily.
I respond in the same tone.
For a moment, our eyes meet across the table
filled with fire, and we are on the brink of a fight.
But Adriano has even on such an occasion
the intuitive originality of a poet.
And don't think that I drink for the fun of it, he shouts at me.
After calming down almost immediately,
we reconcile and return to our conversation.
Then Adriano launches into a description
of what he calls his anaconda.
He shows me the place in his abdomen here.
It twists itself around here, and then it
climbs up here and curls up again where,
in the moments strongest physical discomfort,
the morning after, he seems to feel
this large, snake-like animal moving inside of him.
In his own tragic and funny style,
he had conjured up this creature to fight his depressions.
Did he ever write about his anaconda in his poems?
August 5, 1981, the old hospital in Urbino, a poetry
reading inside the unforgettable frame of the old hospital,
a magnificent arcade of the 16th century
reopened for the event in a corner
beneath the ancient walls surrounding this haunting city,
Adriano reads a sort of calendar poem
in which the year has 13 months.
What a striking difference from this stormy Australian reading.
After all, only three years have passed,
and yet it is as if an epoch were closing.
Now the text is reading with a calm veiled voice is still
surreal, but it is also pervaded by elegy,
like the beginning of a long farewell.
Christmas 1981, Molino di Bazzano, Parma.
Once again, the image of Santa Claus
leaps out, a kind of country cottage with logs
burning in the fireplace in the middle of the night
in the middle of the snow.
But it appears merrier this time.
Adriano, together with his friend,
is preparing the anthology of Italian poetry
1960 to 1980, which would be published the following year,
marking one of the first contacts
between Italian and American contemporary poetry.
Fall of 1983, New Haven, Connecticut.
I receive La piegatura del foglio,
The Folding of the Paper, Adriano's second collection
of poetry after La composizione del testo, The Composition
of the Text of 1978, which, together
with this posthumous book, La definizione del
prezzo, The Definition of the Price, soon to be published,
makes up his trilogy of linear poetry.
As I read, my eyes catch with emotion
that we all feel when we see our name appear
in a dedication, a poem, "Phases of the Moon" and "Elsewhere,"
dedicated to me.
But in a poem dedicated by a true poet,
there is much more than an act of respect or affection
which by itself would risk being coy.
There is an aesthetic soul-searching
that is doubly merciless.
First of all, towards the dedicant.
'I have what I have given,' wrote the greatest and most
misunderstood Italian poet of the century,
because by offering one of his texts the poet is exposing
the most defenseless part of his writing,
which involves the unavoidable anxiety that accompanies each
gift.
It is merciless also towards dedicatee
because a hypothesis is expressed on him
with the long and subtle digging and probing that can make
one shudder by the dedicant.
But finally, and above all, a poem with a dedication
holds within it rather risky ambition
of joining together a part of the spirit
of the donor with a part of the spirit of the receiver.
Some lines from Adriano's 'Phases of the Moon' and
'Elsewhere,' I quote, 'For a man who puts on boots in a warm
and damp air, sopping wet and festering,
against the man who puts on boots and moves,
heavy with mud, subject to all ills, in the inviting marsh,
inside the man who puts on boots and listens to a whispering
ulcer of lukewarm puddles,' end of quote.
A reconciliation and a poetry lesson
from Adriano, who thus truly opens
a long dialogue from far away--
I shall have to wait five years before responding--
Adriano's voice remains behind a solitary man's shoulders
each time that, thinking about the snow or the mud
on the ground, he puts on his boots
before leaving his cottage.
Spring of 1984, Molino di Bazzano.
There are four or five of us around Adriano at the county
in--
at the country inn towards noon.
I recall an explosion of yellows, the straw and wine
bottles, egg yolks, bright, merry sauce, and fresh noodles.
We are all speaking out loud.
Pasolini-- positively yes, definitely not.
Metrics in poetry-- absolutely not, definitely yes.
In cases such as this one of apparently indifferent omen,
during a conversation which seems as unsteady
as the table where it is unfolding,
what actually circulates rapidly and secretly is
an epiphany that we search for so often and so uselessly
at our solitary desks.
Somewhere in the '80s, New York, Adriano,
another Italian poet, myself, frozen
inside the artificially warm colors
of a small photograph taken at a street corner in Manhattan.
Adriano in the middle appears like a teacher of repatriation.
In our uncertain smiles, one can read all too clearly,
why do we stay here?
Why don't we go back together with Adriano, each one of us
in search of his own personal mill in the country or at least
in the suburbs which belong to us?
Fall of 1986, Milan train station.
I run across Adriano by chance.
We stop at one of those old station counters
under the great arch barrel vault
made of steel and glass which filters
the light with a noble gray color,
redeeming every dreary detail below,
each one with a cup of coffee in his hand, the traveling
bag by his feet.
Adriano just returned from Belgium,
where he took part in a poetry reading, 'Inside a Mind.'
He speaks about it with brief simplicity, a part
of his routine as a poet.
I, however, feel the lesson of commitment
to be always open to the venture of words.
He appears weary.
We begin to talk--
who knows why-- about retirement.
Adriano shrugged his shoulders and makes a grimace
as if to say, I won't have to worry about that.
June 31, 1988, Linsley Lake, Connecticut.
I finally find the idea for a poem-- that is, it finds me--
to be dedicated to Adriano.
I write it and send it to him.
The protagonist of the poem, rather than
the one named in the title, "Sleepless Neg,"
Neg is a proper name in Italian, is an animal
that fascinates me, a raccoon, a word that I discovered
has its roots in the language of Native Americans.
This animal does not exist in Italy.
The hypothesis and the basis of the connection between dedicant
and dedicatee, which I attempt with this poem,
is that the striped, furry creature that
moves in the night, the serious and grotesque animal,
darkly merry, is a totem of the tribe whose
medicine man is Adriano while I am only one of the tribesmen.
November 27, 1988 New York.
Having just returned from Italy and preparing
to get on a flight to Arizona, I receive a phone call
from Bologna.
Adriano has perished sadly, a heart
attack a couple of days before in his new mill
in the countryside near Reggio Emilia, just a few miles away
from where I was on that day, unawares.
I address my letter of condolences
to Bruno Spatola, the name that I had found in my address book
next to Adriano's, thinking that he is a relative.
Only later do I discover that it was his name,
his true and legal name.
Adriano was his pen name.
I feel very foolish, naturally.
But there is also a dark fear on my part which I cannot tame
to pseudonyms, and nicknames, and noms de plume.
Reconsidering, I see now that addressing
a letter of condolences directly,
even if unknowingly, to the disappeared person,
there is a kind of hyper-reality that actually would not
displease a poet.
February 1989, Linsley Lake.
While I am speaking on the telephone,
a squeaking and screeching suddenly explodes outside,
but it is so loud that at first I think it is indoors.
It is similar to the one produced
by squirrels when they are excited,
but this one is indeed much stronger.
I interrupt the conversation, and I lean over the terrace.
It is night, but the outside lamp
shines on a part of the downhill terrain under it.
Two raccoons are facing each other in confrontation.
Their bellies are lying flat and tense on the ground.
They are vibrating.
From above, they appear like two large frogs,
but this is not the right image, except for those
who have understood the beauty of toads, their secret crown.
Actually, the sight of these animals
is so beautifully that it stops, for a fleeting moment,
one's breathing.
Their thick, gray feathers, brightened
by the black, shiny streaks that crisscross them, stand out
like a bejeweled trophy on an oriental tapestry,
the carpet of dry leaves, which, contrasting with those colors,
has a golden glow and the wet sparkle,
as if we were still at the onset of autumn.
Another moment, and the scene dissolves.
The tension that bound the two suddenly disappears.
They move away from each other in opposite directions
with a slow, slouching, and merrily desperate step
of dandies.
Now the leaves are pale again."
[BECK] Are you comfortable?
[VALESIO] Yeah.
[BECK] Could be a little louder.
[VALESIO] Thank you.
Thank you.
Trying to get away from their funereal theme,
I'm going to read a poem that I wrote rather recently
in California that is, I suppose,
about love, although, of course, it is difficult--
I mean, the poem is either about death or about love anyway,
so let's say it's about love in general.
The title is "Garden Winter."
It was written in a beautiful place that probably many of you
know, what is called The Rose Garden in Berkeley.
And what I did was I wrote down carefully--
I think I got them all--
the names of the rose species in the garden that seems to me
beautifully suggestive.
So half of the poem is made up by those names that seem,
as I say, very suggestive to me.
What I am trying to suggest by juxtaposing what I just
read to what I'm going to read is that it seems to me
the condition of exile or, to be less dramatic,
the condition of expatriation is such
that there is no possible mediation,
at least not in poetry.
One can mediate-- pretend to mediate in order to be
diplomatic about the things, but actually it's a rather sharp
juxtaposition of one country toward the other--
against the other.
I read what I consider a very Italian discourse,
and this poem, for me, is an attempt
to come as close to the American language as I can.
The list of names of roses to me was
like speaking in this language, as close as I could.
The epigraph is from a short prose poem
by a man who is currently an inmate of Arizona State
Prison in Florence, Arizona, and it says,
at the end of his short piece, "No one in here
may grow a rose, not even in secret when no one knows.
One must have warmth for such a flower,
and there's none in here at any hour."
That's his poem.
And mine is this.
The guy who appears here is called Mario,
and it's the protagonist of the collection
that I am putting together.
Mario is an Italian name.
"The delicate pride of all those tiny heads not really raised,
bowing, rather, not downwards in a sign of humility
but sideways in ironic attention, which does not,
however, refuse a mystery.
Command performance, cathedral, seafoam, Antigua, Blanc Double
de Coubert, Blue Nile, mission bells, portrait, Granada,
Valencia, trumpeter.
But what mystery, where?
Did it not disappear, got chased away
by all these roses in their present flashiness, flowers
that merrily ignore the only colors that can allow knowledge
to surface, the impossible colors like gold, or azure,
or emerald.
Matterhorn, Sweet 16, invitation, American pride,
bahia, Aquarius, Futura, Faberge, Tropicana, honor,
Electra, Touch of Venus, Rochefort, Color Magic,
and also gone from the garden is the young woman meditating.
She was sitting then, all composed and gathered
on the axis of her supple bust but with her head bent
sideways, listening and miming those flowers.
In her place instead are the everyday shadows that
chase away the mystery like missed,
tennis players running every so often
to drink from the water fountain, and bitter couples
that argue like professors, little ones, speaking as they
run, with the husky voice of alcoholics,
still wearing, fortunately for them, an apple red grin,
instead of the mad smile of children on their way
to school.
Yankee Doodle, San Francisco, gold medal, mon cheri,
San Antonio, impatient, President Eisenhower, Lilibeth,
Regensburg, Mighty Mouse, red bells, Spanish shawls, angels
mateau, Dr. Debat, Eiffel Tower, Swarthmore, heirloom,
Europeana.
I wonder, asks Mario tepidly to himself,
what their December scent is like.
And like a monkey, he bends over,
but the crown of the flower hisses, annoyed, into his ear.
You must not seek the perfume.
You must seek the words and listen.
Astonished, he withdraws.
What do you have to say then?
Well, nothing much, my son.
By the way, what kind of son have you been?
On a scale of 1 to 10, what number would you choose?
Now he is walking more tightly among the trellis
and the steps, and the bushes.
He looks at them from afar, suspiciously,
but then it gives in.
He approaches other petals with its ear bent
down to catch their whispering.
Hey, there, runaway, dancing groom, too addicted
to dawn serenades.
El Capitan, Marie Copmann, Len Turner, Traumerei, Matangi,
fire magic, marine, torchy, sun bright, cherry vanilla,
pristine, pot of gold, Sweet Afton, Cecile Brunner,
lyric, David Thompson, Belinda, Arizona, Roman Holiday,
bewitched.
Mario begins to climb the steps slowly.
Just a while ago, everything was beautiful in the morning,
in life.
Now he's bent over, and he's biting
his lip, unable to find the strength again.
He sits like a broken toy, watching the children down
by the bridge, but only dark shapes leap to his eyes.
Mare grand, autumn gold, Comanche, picture, iceberg,
maid of honor, remembrance, Garden State,
Choo Choo Centennial, galaxy, Anita Charles, honor,
Simon Bolivar, Jane Berner, cherish, paradise.
But he would not give up, even if raising himself
causes a sharp silent pain like moaning.
He continues to climb the fringes, all green, uninhabited
by flowers.
A sparkling flash attracts him, far and close,
a panther's eye in the bushes, neither animal nor plant.
It is the only hope flashing by.
A thorn grabs him by the sleeve.
Mario bends again to listen.
What is my name?
Well your name is Rosa.
No, say it in English.
Whatever for?
I speak and I am Italian, and I want
to rest in the folds in the embrace of my own words
in the simple, ancient refrains of the people with whom
I identify.
It's a bed of roses, he who does not sleep reposes.
The branch twists itself around his arm
and with one hard pull makes him bend down to the ground.
He feels the small leaves on his head.
He sees the gray, black, dark soil, stripped,
soaked in dampness.
What is my name?
They call you rose.
And what does it mean?
It means nothing.
Or perhaps it means only that all nothing enclosed
within the coffer called the proper name,
like in the window, La Ventana de Rosa,
of the mission church of San Jose San Miguel
de Aguayo, a great picture of stone roses,
curled, contorted, overblown, created by a simple stone
cutter was named without a reason,
has engraved itself in the mind, Pedro Huizar.
To exalt and honor his Rosa, his lost love,
a window that seems to speak-- or rather it is the window
of San Antonio that makes it sing--
the kisses you denied you can no longer give.
The kisses that you offered you can no longer recall.
The branch shakes him, pulls him till it forces
him to bend on the ground.
You fool.
It's not the name you must think of.
Think of the verb.
Mario rises again, slowly, slowly patting his hands
on his knees to remove the dust.
He continues with weak steps towards a crest
up high on the edge of the garden
beyond the rose bed where the mantle of soil, warmly
gathered, reveals, when one unfolds it, tens of thousands
of tiny hands folded tight, finger over finger
crossed in prayers of dark humility
without pride or flowers, without illusions
but the grass of life cuts across those fists
and aims on I.
Mario is running with uncertain certain steps
in search of the brilliance of an iridescent skin,
in hope of the panther."
These have been very long.
I think I will finish with a couple of very short poems.
These will be my last ones from a collection
which is difficult to translate into Italian.
I called it "La campagna dell' Ottantasette."
Campagna in Italian means, as you know, either country
or campaign, as in military campaign,
and I wanted to preserve both meanings,
so the closest I come in translation
is "The 1987 Country Campaign."
And it's a kind of a bet.
I wanted to write in real time, so
to speak, that is, to write a book of poem in one year
and only in one year and to preserve
only the poems in that year, and this is the year of 1987.
Most of them are not titled.
This one is in two parts.
The first part is "Beauty, Unbearable."
The second part is "Beauty, Bearable."
"Beauty, Unbearable."
"When the trunk of an ash tree, solar and smooth,
becomes a narrow, golden door with a reflection of a fir tree
bough unveils itself, so fragile and so exact,
it is the spirit of the branch."
"Beauty, Bearable.
"When two carpenters rise up all at once
in passing, near the highway but far away with their glances,
extend out high, at noon, on the crest of a roof,
balancing on the tall boots and the slender hips
emerging from the wide leather belts, heavy with hammers,
with tools.
They are resting, and they smell,
without taking notice, the scent of the dismembered wood.
Far away their gaze, there, where wood cannot be seen
but only large stains of green and gray undergrowth.
The other poem--
I realize now I'm not ending in an upbeat, but OK.
The last poem is called "Young Woman's Skin."
"If the snow covered by the night is sinister,
the snow, close-packed in the sun,
is cruel, like a young woman's skin.
At a point, arriving too soon, he threw away the shovel,
he crawled behind the wheel, he saw
his face twisted in the small mirror,
the face of the whole body.
And this body belongs to a prisoner screaming
with terror in the long wait for punishment lacking redemption.
It is a wretched torment of the moment within each day.
His own voice traveling through the vessels in the snow
and in his body is a hissing wind in his ear,
saying, I know what and who I am paying for.
But no, he doesn't know at all, and here lies his fear.
The face tortured by exhaustion with a furrowed and creased
grayness loses fortune's friendship.
A face so sparkle-empty, lampshade of charred paper,
does not draw or go near another face."
Thank you for your patience very much.