TO BENEDETTA CRAVERI
The captive mahogany of a private Roman
flat. In the ceiling, a dust-covered crystal island.
At sunset, the windowpanes pan a common
ground for the nebulous and the ironed.
Setting a naked foot on the rosy marble,
the body steps toward its future: to its attire.
If somebody shouted “Freeze!” I’d perform that marvel
as this city happily did in its childhood hour.
The world’s made of nakedness and of foldings.
Still, the latter’s richer with love than a face, that’s certain.
Thus an opera tenor’s so sweet to follow
since he yields invariably to a curtain.
By nightfall, a blue eye employs a tear,
cleansing, to a needless shine, the iris;
and the moon overhead apes an emptied square
with no fountain in it. But of rock as porous.
The month of stalled pendulums. Only a fly in August
in a dry carafe’s throat is droning its busy hymn.
The numerals on the clock face crisscross like earnest
antiaircraft searchlights probing for seraphim.
The month of drawn blinds, of furniture wrapped in cotton
shrouds, of the sweating double in the mirror above the cupboard,
of bees that forget the topography of their hives and, coated
with suntan honey, keep staggering seaward.
Get busy then, faucet, over the snow-white, sagging
muscle, tousle the tufts of thin gray singes!
To a homeless torso and its idle, grabby
mitts, there’s nothing as dear as the sight of ruins.
And they, in their turn, see themselves in the broken Jewish
r no less gladly: for the pieces fallen
so apart, saliva’s the only solution they wish
for, as time’s barbarous corneas scan the Forum.
The tiled, iron-hot, glowing hills: midsummer.
Clouds feel like angels, thanks to their cooling shadows.
Thus the bold cobblestone eyes, like a happy sinner,
the blue underthings of your leggy blond friend. A bard of
trash, extra thoughts, broken lines, unmanly,
I hide in the bowels of the Eternal City
from the luminary that rolled back so many
marble pupils with rays bright enough for setting
up yet another universe. A yellow square. Noontime’s
stupor. A Vespa’s owner tortures the screaming gears.
Clutching my chest with my hand, at a distance
I reckon the change from the well-spent years.
And, like a book at once opened to all its pages,
the laurels scratch the scorched white of a balustrade.
And the Colosseum looms, the skull of Argus,
through whose sockets clouds drift like a thought of the vanished herd.
Two young brunettes in the library of the husband
of the more stunning one. Two youthful, tender
ovals hunch over pages: a Muse telling Fate the substance
of several things she tried to render.
The swish of old paper, of red crepe de chine. A humming
fan mixes violets, lavender, and carnations.
Braiding of hair: an elbow thrusts up its summit
accustomed to cumulus-thick formations,
Oh, a dark eye is obviously more fluent
in brown furniture, pomegranates, oak shutters.
It’s more keen, it’s more cordial than a blue one;
to the blue one, though, nothing matters!
The blue one can always tell the owner
from the goods, especially before closing—
that is, time from living—and turn the latter over,
as tails strain to look at heads in tossing.
Jig, little candle tongue, over the empty paper,
bow to the rotten breath as though you were courted,
follow—but don’t get too close!—the pauper
letters standing in line to obtain the content.
You animate the walls, wardrobe, the sill’s sweetbriar:
more than handwriting is ever after;
even your soot, it appears, soars higher
than the holiest wish of these musings’ author.
Still, in their midst you earn yourself a decent
name, as my fountain pen, in memory of your tender
commas, in Rome, at the millennium’s end, produces
a lantern, a cresset, a torch, a taper,
never a period—and the premises look their ancient
selves, from the severed head down to a yellow toenail.
For an ink pot glows bright whenever someone mentions
light, especially in a tunnel.
Clicking of a piano at the siesta hour.
Stillness of sleepy mews acquires
C-flats, as scales coat a fish which narrows
round the corner. Exhaling quarrels,
inhaling a fusty noon’s air, the stucco
flaps its brown gills, and a sultry, porous
cavity of a mouth scatters
around cold pearls of Horace.
I’ve never built that cloud-thrusting stony
object that could explain clouds’ pallor.
I’ve learned about my own, and any
fate, from a letter, from its black color.
Thus some fall asleep while hugging
a Leica, in order to take a picture
of the dream, to make themselves out, having
awakened in a developed future.
Eggshells of cupolas, vertebrae of bell towers.
Colonnades’ limbs sprawled wide in their blissful, heathen
leisure. The square root of a skylark scours
the bottomless, as though prior to prayers, heaven.
Light reaps much more than it has sown: an awkward
body hides in a crack while its shadow shutters
walls. In these parts, all windows are looking northward,
where the more one boozes the less one matters.
North! A white iceberg’s frozen-in piano;
smallpoxed with quartz, vases’ granite figures;
a plain unable to stop field-glass scanning;
sweet Ashkenazy’s ten running fingers.
Never again are the legions to thread those contours:
to a creaking pen, even its words won’t hearken.
And the golden eyebrow—as, at sunset, a cornice—
rises up, and the eyes of the darling darken.
In these squinting alleyways, where even a thought about
one’s self is too cumbersome, in this furrowed clutter
of the brain which has long since refused to cloud
the universe, where now keyed up, now scattered,
you trundle your boots on the cobbled, checkered
squares, from a fountain and back to a Caesar—
thus a needle shuffles across the record
skipping its grooves—it is altogether
proper to settle now for a measly fraction
of remaining life, for the past life craving
completeness, for its attempts to fashion
an integer. The sound the heels are scraping
from the ground is the aria of their union,
a serenade that what-has-been-longer
hums to what’s-to-be-shorter. This is a genuine
Caruso for a gramophone-dodging mongrel.
Lesbia, Julia, Cynthia, Livia, Michelina.
Bosoms, ringlets of fleece: for effects, and for causes also.
Heaven-baked clay, fingertips’ brave arena.
Flesh that renders eternity an anonymous torso.
You breed immortals: those who have seen you bare,
they, too, turned Catulluses, statues, heavy
Neros, et cetera. Short-term goddesses! you are
much more a joy to believe in than a permanent bevy.
Hail the smooth abdomen, thighs as their hamstrings tighten.
White upon white, as Kazimir’s dream image,
one summer evening, I, the most mortal item
in the midst of this wreckage resembling the whole world’s rib cage,
sip with feverish lips wine from a tender collar-
bone; the sky is as pale as a cheek with a mole that trembles;
and the cupolas bulge like the tits of the she-wolf, fallen
asleep after having fed her Romulus and her Remus.
Mimicking local pines, embrace the ether!
The fingertips won’t cull much more than the pane’s tulle quiver.
Still, a little black bird won’t return from the sky blue, either.
And we, too, aren’t gods in miniature, that’s clear.
That’s precisely why we are happy: because we are nothings; speckled
pores are spurned by summits or sharp horizons;
the body is space’s reversal, no matter how hard you pedal.
And when we are unhappy, it’s perhaps for the same small reasons.
Better lean on a portico, loose the white shirt that billows,
stone cools the spinal column, gray pigeons mutter,
and watch how the sun is sinking into gardens and distant villas,
how the water—the tutor
of eloquence—pours from the rusted lips, repeating
not a thing, save a nymph with her marble truants,
save that it’s cold and fresh, save that it’s splitting
the face into rippling ruins.
Private life. Fears, shredded thoughts, the jagged
blanket renders the contours of Europe meager.
By means of a blue shirt and a rumpled jacket
something still gets reflected in the wardrobe mirror.
Let’s have some tea, face, so that the teeth may winnow
lips. Yoked by a ceiling, the air grows flatter.
Cast inadvertently through the window,
a glance makes a bunch of blue jays flutter
from their pine tops. A room in Rome, white paper,
the tail of a freshly drawn letter: a darting rodent.
Thus, thanks to the perfect perspective, some objects peter
out; thus, still others shuffle across the frozen
Tanaïs, dropping from the picture, limping,
occiputs covered with wilted laurels and blizzards’ powder—
toward Time, lying beyond the limits
of every spraddling superpower.
Lean over. I’ll whisper something to you: I am
grateful for everything: for the chicken cartilage
and for the chirr of scissors already cutting
out the void for me—for it is your hem.
Doesn’t matter if it’s pitch-black, doesn’t matter if
it holds nothing: no ovals, no limbs to count.
The more invisible something is,
the more certain it’s been around,
and the more obviously it’s everywhere. You
were the first to whom all this happened, were you?
For a nail holding something one would divide by two—
were it not for remainders—there is no gentler quarry.
I was in Rome. I was flooded by light. The way
a splinter can only dream about.
Golden coins on the retina are to stay—
enough to last one through the whole blackout.
1981 • Translated by the Author