TO FAUSTO MALCOVATI
Once a volcano here belched with zest.
Later, a pelican plucked its breast.
Virgil dwelt not too far away,
and Wystan Auden held drinks at bay.
These days, the palaces’ stucco peels,
frightful prices make longer bills.
Yet I somehow still make, amid
all these changes, my line ends meet.
A fisherman sails into the azure,
away from the drying bed linen’s lure.
And autumn splashes the mountain ridge
with a wave unknown to the empty beach.
On the balustrade, my wife and child
peer at a distant piano lid
of sail, or at the small balloon
of Angelus fleeing the afternoon.
Unreachable, as it were, by foot,
an island as a kind of fate
suits solely the sirocco; but
we also are fluent at
banging the shutters. A sudden draft
scattering papers right and left
is proof that in this limestone
place we are not alone.
The rectangular, mortal-held eggshell,
enduring the wind’s solid brow, as well
as the breakers’ wet hammer works,
reveals at dusk three yolks.
The bougainvillea’s tightly wound
scrawl helps the isolated ground
to shade its limited shame a bit,
avenging thus space with writ.
Almost no people; so that pronouns
sharpen one’s features all at once,
as though speech makes them definite like a lens
at the vista’s expense.
And should someone sigh longingly “Home,” your hand
more willingly than to the continent
might point to the cumulous peaks where great
worlds rise and disintegrate.
We are a threesome here and I bet
what we together are looking at
is three times more addressless and more blue
than what Aeneas saw sailing through.
1993
Translated by the author