The middlemen stepped in the mud
on your nameless cadaver.
The God of the Albinos has sat down
on your dead body as if on a toilet.
Italo Calvino
On the boat to America, after a late breakfast,
he would sit on the side of the swimming pool
and flirt. A different woman every day,
a journalist, a photo model, a housewife.
We, the other four writers, thought it grotesque.
We were just jealous.
He had the eyelashes of a girl,
the centuries-old scowl of Italian scepticism.
He looked after his complexion, his fingernails, his shoes.
For weeks we crossed the New Continent.
Days in the hot car, with the five of us.
He generally wanted to be behind the wheel, he drove too fast,
swerving too much because he was short-sighted
and too vain to wear his glasses.
He didn’t want to drive in the desert.
Holding forth on structure and concept,
on ultimate finiteness from the back seat
until he fell asleep mumbling dipping rhymes.
It is thirty years ago.
We wrote poetry back then without punctuation.
He had lived in the mountains with the partisans,
that makes you mistrust spontaneity.
He found the framework in most phonemes,
praising the skeleton in words and in women.
“Italo, for God’s sake put on your glasses!”
“Vivere non basta, caro.”
The tumour had already nestled in under his elegant cranium.
Brother
“It’s hard,” he said, “bloody hard.
And unfair too. I’m finally losing weight.”
Autumn outside, a corn field stretching to the end of the road,
the words slip out, the end of the road.
He doesn’t say another word.
A plastic tube snakes down his throat.
He hiccups for hours. Can’t swallow.
Movement still in his right hand,
which carries the left like a fat lily.
The hand gives me a thumbs-up,
sending signals until his final collapse.
His skin has gone white, childlike.
He squeezes my frightened hand.
I still search for a similarity — ours,
her restlessness,
his impatience (no time for time),
the mistrust and gullibility of both—
and land in our first past,
the one with a world like a meadow with frogs,
like a ditch with eels,
and later, bets and dares, table tennis,
house rules, the 52 cards,
the three dice
and constant unbridled hunger.
(I grow old instead of you.
I eat pheasant and smell the woods.)
His housing is restricted now.
The machine breathes for him,
sucking up the phlegm.
A rattle from his diaphragm
and then his last movement, a sluggish wink.
The migration of a soul. A disposition. A portion cut off.
His body still shrinking
and then suddenly in the face that was dead,
a frown and a cramp
and then a gaping look of fury,
unbearably lucid, the anger and terror
of a tyrant. What does he see? Me, a man
turning away in cowardly surprise at his tears?
Then morning comes and they undo the straps.
And he is forever
from Cruel Happiness [1999]
What to Speak About
What to speak about tonight? Speaking
in a country we recognise, tolerate,
seldom forget.
This country with its slapstick genesis,
its clammy climate, its filthy stories
about the old days,
its inhabitants, grasping until they finally collapse
between the cauliflowers.
They keep on multiplying
in a paradise of their own invention,
craving happiness, trembling, mush in their mouths.
Like in nature,
where our runts of hills are depilated,
our fields scorched, our air poisoned,
yet the unsuspecting cows keep grazing.
Speaking about this country’s writing,
publications full of question marks
on patient paper
continually shocked by its history
and fleeing into deceptive shorthand.
Speaking about the heavy drapes
people draw around themselves.
But we hear them still, the stinking
primates who corner each other in rooms.
Like in nature,
where the hibiscus gives off no scent,
leaving that to the innocent cows who sink
into the drenched earth.
Speaking in this country of gleaming grass,
in which man,
that immoderate worm, that dreaming carcass,
lingers among the cadavers which, dead as they may be,
remain obedient to our memories.
Like our nature which expects a single, solitary
miracle that will eventually, finally
illuminate what one was,
not just this shabby spectacle
thrown together by time.
Speaking about time, which, so they say,
will remain like a brand and a palimpsest?
We lived in an age of using
and being useful.
What defence can we offer for that?
Which festive feathers in our caps?
Which song in the cellar? Maybe.
Say it. Maybe.
A few scratches on slate
to mark the silhouette of your lover.
Fingerprints in clay for her hips.
Phonemes of delight that sometimes resounded
as she, when she, cried out for you like a cat.
Speaking about her presence
wakens the violet hour of twilight.
Like in nature,
the merciless, glassy azure
of our planet seen from Apollo.
And even if your party hat begins
to weigh heavily from speech alone
and the lifeline on your palm
begins to fester,
still, nonetheless, in spite of this
honour the flowering
of the shades that inhabit us,
the shades that beg for comfort.
And stroke her shoulder blade.
Like a hunchback’s hump.
Still craving a cruel kind of happiness.
Interview
There’s a knocking on my door
and, yes, it’s the young poet
— I recognise his teeth—
who once sang the glory of my alliteration
and — oh, familiarity! — has gnawed
at my ankles in the papers ever since.
I bid him enter.
He says he lives from readings
and interviews for magazines.
His wife has been depressive since her teens.
I help him out of his coat.
I pour him a shot of jenever.
His letting me have it in the paper, he says,
was hard, a bitter cup, and not his intent.
It was forced on him by the editor of the cultural supplement.
Our talk would be, broadly speaking,
not too long, about love without stains,