La manica di questa giacca è lunga. Il braccio si protrae verso un ramo di ciliegio come per indicare un fiore rosa. Consumata ai polsi, la stoffa, scura, svela le due lancette di una delle quattro. Quante volte ti sei accorto delle quattro? L’attenzione per un fiore rosa alle ore quattro. Petali fibrillano nella brezza dell’aria: un soffio che nulla vuol cambiare. Il rimedio per una manica troppo lunga.
Topography North/ 1
The sleeve of this jacket is long. The arm extends towards a cherry branch as if to indicate a pink flower. Consumed at the cuffs, the fabric, dark, reveals the two hands of the one of the four. How many times have you noticed the four? Attention to a pink flower at four o’clock. Petals quiver in the breeze: a sigh that would nothing change. The antidote for a sleeve that’s too long.
If you would like to read more of Luka’s poetry on this blog, click HERE.
Dunque, come scrivevo, questo infinito sgomento – non della morte, affatto- le grandi ali dei suoni. Giovanni, si era arrampicato su una roccia strappando un ramoscello pieno di belle bacche. Le ha date alla Gemma. Oh! – disse- Io stavo a guardare tutto. Ancora una volta mi metto a immaginare quel fatto ma di quanti anni prima? dopo quanti anni?…
MATERNITA’
prima
Io le sentivo allora dalla spaccatura, intanto di soppiatto …..fissavo
le loro garze inzuppate e gli stracci
buttati nel catino, su cui sfolgorava lucentissima la luce …..del sole
dal vetro della finestrella; – e mi sentivo così solo e sopraffatto
come se in quel momento mi fosse stato dato a sorte
il miracolo stupefacente della vita. Avevo anche …..timore
che la balia uscisse all’improvviso e mi trovasse dietro …..la spaccatura
a sbirciare quell’evento a me proibito – soprattutto
scoprisse che avevo sentito le loro parole, scoprisse
la mia bravata maldestra.
segùnda
Dopo l’ultimo parto era smagrita;
le palpebre sempre inarcate; i seni
avevano perso la forma – lei lo vedeva e lo nascondeva …..e era smarrita, silenziosa,
quasi per conto suo. …..A volte, invece, si sedeva
immutabile, per attimi e attimi,
nella stessa posa, e assorta,
nel piccolo sgabello di betulla; si passava le mani
con un pezzo di sapone sbeccato – io lo intuivo
dall’odore entrando in stanza sua –
e mi piaceva, perché il sapone era sempre destinato
al giorno della festa e della domenica; – e ancora, adoperava
varie erbe officinali, raccolte di fretta la sera al scendere del sole,
erbe che rinfrescavano la pelle e davano alla faccia un carnato
lucido e pallido. Un giorno
mi guardò che la guardavo nello specchietto
forse aveva sentito la mia presenza alle spalle,
e sobbalzò tutta: fece una mossa
come se fosse scesa di colpo da un salto.
“ Così, hai notato anche tu che sono sciupata?”
e all’istante ridivenne lieta, consolata, bella
come un tempo, prima del suo mutamento
e prima dei grandi mutamenti incontrollabili del tempo.
“Una camminata fatto in quei
giorni che il freddo accorcia la pioggia… io
e lei, la Gemma, mia madre, di 95 anni”.
tèersa
Portami a camminare con te
appena lì avanti, fino al muro della contrada,
fin dove la valle si apre e appare
il campanile peraria e di sasso, calcinato dallo sprazzo …..di luna,
così peraria e immateriale
così distaccato, quasi etereo
che puoi anche credere che non esiste
il vuoto con le sue lontananze.
Portami a camminare con te.
Ci abbandoneremo un momento sul sasso,
sul dosso,
e inumidendoci fra serti di brina
forse crederemo persino di volare,
perché a volte, come adesso, sento lo stropiccìo …..dei miei panni
che sembra il fremito di due ali grandi,
e quando ti accosti a questo battito del volo
senti alleggerirsi le braccia, il corpo, la tua figura,
e così avvolto nella cornice di una brina azzurra,
negli tratti liberi dell’anima
non ha importanza che tu salpa o ritorni,
né importa che i nostri capelli siano imbiancati,
(è questo che mi dà tenerezza – e mi dà tenerezza
che s’imbianca anche lo sterrato).
Portami a camminare con te.
peraria: cavato su dal dialetto vecchio
TrovateQUI più informazioni su Giacomo Gusmeroli, il suo ultimo libro, “Quattro mesi e venti giorni” è uscito per LietoColle.
* * * * *
An English translation of this poem can be found below:
So, as I wrote, this infinite dismay – not of death, at all – the broad wings of sounds. Giovanni, had climbed up on a rock tearing off a small twig full of beautiful berries. He gave them to Gemma. Oh! –she said– I was watching everything. Once again I re-immagine that moment but how many years before? after how many years?…
MATERNITY
first
I could hear her then through the fissure, meanwhile furtively …..I stared at
their sopping gauze and the rags
thrown into the basin, on which the polished sunlight …..blazed
from the window’s glass; – and I felt so alone and overwhelmed
as if in that moment I had been given at random
the stupefying miracle of life. I was also …..afraid
that the nurse would come out suddenly and find me behind …..the fissure
peering in at that event forbidden to me – especially
discover that I had heard their words, discover
my clumsy escapade.
second
After the last birth she was gaunt;
eyelids always sagging; her breasts
had lost their shape – she saw it and hid it …..she was lost, silent,
almost of her own accord. …..Sometimes, instead, she would sit
unchangeable, for moments and moments,
in the same position, and lost in thought,
on the small birch stool; she passed a chipped
bar of soap over her hands – I intuited that
from the smell upon entering her room –
and it pleased me, because soap was always used
on holidays and Sundays; – and still, she employed
various medicinal herbs, quickly gathered in the evening when the sun went down,
herbs that refreshed the skin and gave the face a pale and glowing
flesh. One day
she saw that I saw her looking in the mirror
perhaps she felt my presence at her shoulder,
and she started: with a movement
as if suddenly landing hard from a jump.
“So, have you also noticed that I’m falling apart?”
and instantly she became happy again, consoled, beautiful
as she once was, before her change
and before the great, uncontrollable changes of time.
“A walk taken in those days when the cold cut short the rain… She and I, Gemma, my mother, 95 years old”.
third
Take me walking with you
just there ahead, up to the wall of the contrada,
up to where the valley opens up and it appears
the unearthly bell tower of stone, whitewashed by the flash …..of moonlight,
so unearthly and immaterial
so detached, almost ethereal
that you can even believe it doesn’t exist
the void with its remoteness.
Take me walking with you.
We let ourselves go for a moment on the rock, …..on our backs,
and dampened among garlands of hoarfrost
perhaps we believe we can even fly
because sometimes, like right now, I hear the rustling …..of my clothes
that seems like the flapping of two broad wings,
and when this beat of flight accosts you
you feel your arms, your body, your features, lighten
and so wrapped up in the frame of azure hoarfrost,
in the liberated lines of the soul
it doesn’t matter if you’re taking off or returning,
nor does it matter that our hair has turned white,
(it’s this that moves me – and it moves me
to see that the path has also turned white).
Take me walking with you.
(translated by Bonnie McClellan)
for more poems by Giacomo Gusmeroli on this blog, clickHERE.
Paesaggio trascrive in polvere il fantasma del tempo
Tratto manomesso; friabile, reticolo evidente.
Maledizione di Jahweh, o di Minerva fatidico dono
Nudo frutto d’Eden, nel lavoro ridefinito.
Asse cartesiana della mente ben ordita
Contro il caos verdeggiante; la ruota della ragione.
EGO SUM dell’uomo tirato in campo ardente
Morbida, intransigente linea infinita.
Cosa abbiamo perso in questo mondo ben composto,
Arato dalla nostra razza divisa e consapevole?
Beatitudine incolta, dura, senza nome;
Primo bacio selvaggio tra Adamo ed Eva d’ossa fine;
Frusciante betulla sbiancata, mai scritta;
Panno primale della lingua, tessuto ma ancora spiegato.
***** ***** *****
SONNET ON DESCARTES’ VINEYARD
Landscape writes out in dust the ghost of time
Well-fingered tract; friable, forceful grid.
Yahweh’s curse or Minerva’s fateful gift
Naked fruit of Eden, in labour, redefined.
Cartesian axle of the ordered mind
Brought against verdant chaos, reason’s wheel.
Man’s own I AM scratched out in burning field
Soft, intransigent infinity of line.
What have we lost in this well-structured world
Ploughed out by our sentient, divided kind?
A hard, unnamed, uncultivated bliss;
Adam and fine-boned Eve’s first savage kiss;
Clattering, chalky aspen undescribed;
Primal cloth of language, woven, yet unfurled.
Click on the player below to listen to the podcast:
Per ascoltare allo podcast in italiano, premete qui sotto:
Before the Simplon pass at the Italian-Swiss border, is a Roman bridge over the Diveria River. It’s called the “new” bridge, because it was built in 1300 c.e. to replace the previous bridge built in the reign of Emperor Augustus that was destroyed by a flood.
“Poetry gives us the opportunity to offer our observations to present and future readers, be they from the perspective of one standing on the bridge watching events or of one standing below and taking on the current. I’m looking forward to a month of editing and I know that my IPM readers are standing on the bridge waiting for the flow of poems to begin…”
So began International Poetry Month 2015 and the flow of poems was fascinating for me to edit and I hope that both Readers and Poets enjoyed getting their feet wet. I offer my most sincere thanks to the participating poets and to the more than 1000 readers who came from the United States, England, Australia, Brazil, Italy, Pakistan, Canada, Denmark, France, India, Luxembourg, Singapore, the UAE, New Zealand, Trinidad & Tobago, Japan, Germany, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Switzerland, Israel, Ghana, the Philippines, Belgium, Peru, Romania, Serbia and Portugal to read their work.
Today is the fourth of March and Spring seems only a few days away here in Northern Italy while I know those in other places are still slogging through the snow. Regardless of the temperature, here the snows have begun to melt and these poems will begin to erode away, disappearing a few at a time and leaving only the voices behind. Some you will still be able to find on the web, or in a book. Some will be gone for good. Where do we go from here? Why across the bridge and in search of new images, new experiences and new poetry. Following is an alphabetical list of the participating poets; each name is also a link to the poet’s work posted at IPM where you will find additional links to individual blogs or published works:
ATTENTION: This is not truly a story about a toddlers encounter with real farm animals or about expatriate Americans having an “Under the Tuscan Sun” experience. It is a story that extends forward and backward from the vanishing point of a life, the life of a baby goat. This is also not a story about how terrible it is to kill and eat animals: in this place, butchering a goat for Easter is like picking an orange, an ordinary part of life. These shepherds are kind to and value their animals for what they are – their livelihood. If you are squeamish about the idea of a goat being butchered, stop reading when you get to the picture of the heard of goats.
It has taken me four years to finish this story. The memory so visceral and the series of sensations so complex that it has resisted my every effort to make it into a comprehensible story or a poem as I have those things from Serra San Bruno or from inside the city walls. This is a liminal place, on the border between the named place – the city – and the lush density of the landscape as it thickens in a following line towards the sea.
A rooster crows, where is the sound coming from? Robin wants to find it. We wander and talk, Matthew’s work day will start soon, we put our feet on the path to go up, to say thank you and goodbye. The three men stand on the side porch. Peppe holds his hand up in warning, his whole body says don’t let the child see: Gianni has brought the stranger to buy a kid, they are slaughtering it, for Easter.
Gianni’s Goats
Peppe is an able butcher and there is not even a bleat. I turn with my child on my hip, my arm between her gaze and the house; I point out to her something on the opposite horizon. I look down and the whey in the gully is mixing with blood. Who would have thought such a tiny thing held so much? When do you explain this to a child…with our language that so neatly separates the words used for meat and those used for animals? We walk, gesturing and talking always pointing Robin’s attention away from the trussed and headless goat on the porch. I look back. It’s skin now hangs down in a tidy rope from the pallid, marbling of meat, veiled with the translucent tissue that keeps it all compact – lubricating the movement between skin and muscle – meat that is still anchored to hoof, hoof that is still tied to a rope slung over the porch’s lintel beam.
They’re hosing down the concrete in front, the dog that had been drinking a bucket of whey pokes his white muzzle down into the gully to lap at the water tinged with milk and blood. Walking back to my van I see the coursing streamlet of whey and blood as it mixes with the almost motionless trickle of shit and urine running under the passenger-side front tire. It flows across the dirt road and into a hillside so full of green that it looks like Eden – will the ground soak it all up, all of this nitrogen and potassium, everything good for making verdant things stronger?
I am nauseous, not simply from the death – all of my senses are too full: baby goats like ballet dancers, the thick scent of manure, the widening red streamlet coursing cheerfully through the green hillside and the little bucket of creamy cheese in my hand. The ancientness of the act dizzyingly dissonant with the shininess of the cars, the space-age plastic of my shoes. I look up.
The sick dog lies on a warm patch of grass. The healthy dog that is tied up ignores his tithe: a fluorescent red round of bone taken from the freshly slaughtered goat that still hangs from the lintel.
A consecutive flow of fluids convene into a single flow: whey/blood/water from the place of men – water/urine/feces from where men keep the animals. In the flow that reaches the bottom of the path in this moment, the color of blood predominates.
Behind the ovile rises the hillside full of breccia – the eroded face of rock worn away by the river far below, flowing towards the Ionian sea. This moment collapses inward and dilates outward: a vanishing point.
From the house there is now a flow of clear water, washing everything clean.
If you haven’t read “The Ovile of Memo and Pepe: Part One” (click here).
Peppe and Mimmo
Inside, the room was clean and sparse. A bucket of water just inside the door held the meter-and-a-half-long wooden stick with which they stirred the cheese. The cheese was boiling in a black iron cauldron, with a mouth a meter wide, that hung over a wood fire burning so hot and clean that I do not recall even a breath of smoke in the tiny room. Some sausages hung from the rafters; on a table catty-corner from the fire a wood plank table held up two bottles of wine and several packs of cigarettes. In the far corner, opposite the fire, Mimmo and Peppe were busy at a shallow-sided, waist-high stone sink, squeezing whey from the cheese through plastic sieves. They looked up from their work, smiling, verbally poking at Matthew for having taken so long to bring his family down to the ovile, saying hello to me and saving all of the best sweet talk for Robin.
Now I’m going to cheat, this is a blog and not a novel so I can show you a picture of Mimmo and Peppe that I’ve posted above and ask you to look at their hands. They are amazing hands, impressively large and smooth, these hands make almost anything they hold look small. I’m also going to break another writer’s rule and slip into something more comfortable, the present tense:
They offer us some curds of the cheese they’re cooking; it tastes like fresh farmers cheese, bright and dry. Mimmo explains that this is the first cooking and that they will cook it again, making it into creamy, rich ricotta (literally: re-cotta/re-cooked). In the meantime they are busily pressing and compressing the cheese, the whey runs down the slanted work surface and into the drain feeding the rivulet of whey specked with curd that we encountered on the way in. Matthew pops another bit of crumbly bright cheese in my mouth and I understand why the dog outside is so happy to lap up the remnants.
Robin is squirming and agitated by the fire, the dark room and the two robust men with hands bigger than her head. She says alternately, “want to go OUTside.” and “want to see BABY goats!” She wants nothing to do with the fresh cheese. She’s squiggled down out of my arms and hoisted up onto her papa’s shoulders. Matthew asks for permission to go through the door next to where Mimmo and Peppe are working; this is the door that leads to the enclosed concrete part of the ovile where all the goats, too young to go out to pasture, are kept.
Inside the Ovile
Ducking through the door we see goats of all ages from ones that look grown to ones that are barely standing, only 24 hours old. Amongst the goats is a lone lamb with his tight white wool looking tidy in comparison to the splendor of speckles, spots and stripes that embellish the surrounding swirl of goats. Their legs and bellies thick with damp feces, the baby goats are still enchanting. Robin shimmies down from her father’s shoulders and her sneakers smack on the wet cement. The baby goats resist her attempts to pat them by dancing away on their delicate hooves in a wave, like startled ballerinas on point. We explain that they’re nervous, that she needs to walk slowly so she can get a little closer. She won’t get her hands on one this time but she’s happily talking to and about them, informing the world in general about which ones are what colors, and which ones are sleeping, or jumping. Then, like any toddler, her attention span is used up and she wants to go.
We come back into the cheese making room where Mimmo and Peppe have started the second cooking. Our shoes, everyone’s shoes, are slimed with goat shit so I am relieved to see that Mimmo meticulously rinses his hands and keeps the cheese stirring stick always up or resting in the bucket of clean water. Robin cannot be tempted to try the cheese and now wants to go outside, see pigs, see pretty, sad puppy. As we walk back down the path towards the pig pens Mimmo and Peppe’s brother, Gianni, is coming up the path with another man, he sees Robin and scoops her up on to his hip, like a veteran papa, and chucks her startled cheek with his broad knuckle and tells her what a lovely girl she is.
Robin balks at being picked up by Gianni but she doesn’t cry she just wriggles and chants her latest mantra, “mama gon pick you up!” Gianni gets the message and puts her down. He, the stranger and Matthew all walk back up to the cheese room and Matthew returns with a small, plastic basket full of hot and creamy fresh ricotta. He spoons bites into my mouth at happy intervals as we walk up and back down the path. Robin is balanced on my hip and we alternately shoot the breeze and point out things to her, rocks in the cliff face, flowers by the side of the road. The ricotta is magnificent.
In the spaces between the rains the sky runs and falls; gathers itself and plunges again towards the sea. Cumulonimbus titans strike their shins on the horizon line as they stumble through the Mediterranean, dead drunk and anxious to reach Ithaca. This is a place where mothers still name their sons Ulysses.
The houses are like barnacles on a rock; roof tiles buried in lichen and slathered with concrete where they meet at the crown in an uneasy sea-sick ridge. Below the rust-eaten white iron boundary of the balcony-rail I can see two flaps of a prickly pear struggling out from between two heavy arcs of terracotta.
The edge of the sky at dawn over the water is like Montale’s description, a singing strip of metal lath, a kite string straining against the rebounding vault of blue. His was the western sea, the Ligurian coast, a sunset light. Here the Ionian dawn makes eastern music…Jove’s mute mistress writes her name in the sand with a round hoof…IO.
Despite lying just above the Ionian Sea, named for Jove’s mythic mistress transformed into a cow, Caulonia Superiore is a place of goats. The goats, along with a few sheep, are kept in enclosures called ‘ovile’ just outside the town walls. There should be a better English translation for the Italian word, “ovile” (oh-VEE-layh) but there is not. “Fold” is inadequate, it’s too short in sound and too broad in meaning. “Goat fold” although accurate, is just plain ugly, clanking off the tongue like a broken carburetor. I mention this translation difficulty because I am about to tell the story of “The Ovile of Mimmo and Pepe” and I don’t want to leave readers scratching their heads as to what an “OH-vile” is until they reach the third paragraph. And so we begin…
View of the land below the Piazza della Carmine in Caulonia Superiore – the Ovile is on the far right towards the bottom…way down there.
THE STORY OF THE OVILE OF MIMMO AND PEPPE
This morning Matthew, Robin and I woke up early to go and visit the ovile of Mimmo and Peppe so that Robin could see the baby goats and we could all have a breakfast of fresh ricotta. The three of us piled into my big blue van and Matthew managed to squeeze, nudge, and coerce it through the slender streets of Caulonia Superiore until we found ourselves on the dirt road that meandered below the vaulting walls that are still (just barely) sustaining Piazza della Carmine above. Matthew parked the van atilt on the shoulder of the road, leaving room for another car to pass, maybe.
The ovile was what you would expect: a big fenced in plot of land for the grown sheep and goats in which every hint of something green had been eaten. Three rambunctious, gangly white puppies tumbled over one another, and a minor river of water, goat shit and urine ran across the road and under the front tires of my van. Adjacent to the large open pen was a roofed enclosure where the baby animals were kept separate and which was abutted by a cinder block shed where Peppe and Mimmo were working making the cheese.
As we walked up the path towards the porch that fronted the shed we passed by a fluffy white dog whose eyes were badly infected, the skin all around them pitted and inflamed. Robin wanted to pet it until she got a little closer and her good will towards animals banged flat up against something sad and ugly. She solved the struggle by resorting to reassuring herself with words, “Bobbie give sad puppy hug, now she happy puppy!” She looked obliquely at the dog while hugging her own round, pink arms. I found my self wondering when we should start teaching her to look at the ugly things straight on and with compassion instead of looking at the ground and calling them beautiful; then I remembered that I was still working on that one myself and our daughter was not yet two years old. Today would not be the day.
We passed by a small fenced in garden with olive and lemon trees. Across from this were a series of low-walled concrete pens one of which housed two large, pink pigs. Matthew held his hand down to their wiggly snouts saying, “See, it’s a pig. He has a wiggly nose.” Robin edged nervously against my leg saying, “Mama gonna pick you up. Don’t want pigs.” For the first time she was seeing the real animals and they were not wearing plaid shirts and blue jeans like the small, shiny, cartoon pigs in her picture book. They were twice as big as she, I would have been nervous too. I lifted her up. “Lets go see Mimmo and Peppe and the BABY goats,” I said.
As we neared the shed we saw another white dog, this one young and healthy, tied up near a large tree. He was lapping up the water and whey and bits of curd that came from a tube functioning as a drain that led from the cheese making shed out the door and on to the concrete sluice that angled down from the porch. As we reached the open door to the shed Matthew said the obligatory “con permesso” as we walked in.
I found these poems by chance in a book amongst a pile of books and papers on a side table in an efficency apartment loaned to us in Caulonia (RC). I had never heard of Lucia d’Amato and, unfortunately, I don’t think you will find her book “Sostenere il sogno” anywhere other than this table, next to its clot of dusty papers. These few poems express the dense and lovely reflections of what I saw everyday that late winter and early spring in Caulonia Superiore.
CALDI PASSATEMPI
Caldi passatempi nell'aria,
E un vago color mattone
nel cuore,
parla di case abitate.
Un sonno silenzioso.
L'inverno passa.
WARM PASSTIMES
Warm passtimes in the air
and a vague brick colour
in the heart,
speaks of inhabited habitations.
A silent sleep.
Wintertime passes.
LE PRIME ORE D’UN POMERIGGIO
Le prime ore
d'un pomeriggio brullo,
color di terra, di sabbia, e d'oro,
e la solennità
dei gochi più sereni
del tempo.
Dall'autunno al'inverno
andando verso l'estate,
come un grosso pacco
la campagna si svolge.
Un gregge sta,
come una nevicata sporca
Da un rotolio di nuvole
sguscia il sole.
THE FIRST HOURS OF AN AFTERNOON
The first hours
of a bare afternoon,
Colour of earth, of sand,
and of gold,
and the solomnity
of weather's more serene games.
From Autumn to Winter
now tending towards summer,
the countryside unwraps herself
like a fat package.
A flock stands
like dirty snow fallen
from a roll of clouds
that just slip-shelled the sun.
nota bene: Original poems in Italian by Calabrian poet Lucia D’Amato as published in “Sostenere il Sogno”. Translations in English copyright 2009 Bonnie M. McClellan.
LE PRIME ORE D’UN POMERIGGIO
Bonnie McClellan-Broussard 