The sun’s setting, and the corner bar bangs its shutters.
Lampposts flare up, as though an actress
paints her eyelids dark violet, looking both rum and scary.
And the headache is parachuting squarely
behind enemy wrinkles. While five enormous
pigeons on the Palazzo Minelli’s cornice
are copulating in the last rays of sunset,
paying no heed, as our Stone Age ancest-
ors did, no doubt, to their scruffy neighbors,
already asleep or a little nervous.
The booming bells of the slant bell tower
rooted in the ultramarine sky over
this town are like fruits keen on falling rather
than hitting the ground. If there is another
life, someone picks them up there. Well, pretty
soon we’ll find out. Here, where plenty
of saliva, rapturous tears, and even
seed has been shed, in a nook of the earthly Eden,
I stand in the evening, absorbing slowly
with the dirty sponge of my lungs the lovely,
transparent, autumn-cum-winter, lucent
local oxygen, pink with loosened
tiles and a windowsill’s carnation,
and giving the scent of cells’ liberation
from time. The money-like, crumpled water
of the canal, buying off the palazzo’s outer
riches, ends up with a somewhat shady,
peeling-off deal that includes a shaky
caryatid shouldering still the organ
of speech, with its cigarette, and ogling
the scenes, breathtaking for their oblivion
of propriety, happening in the avian
bedroom, exposed to a passing party,
and resembling now a windswept palm tree,
now a jumble of numerals insane with their quest for timing,
now a line scrawled in haste and rhyming.
1995 • Translated by the Author