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Two Poems

Two Poems
Two poems from the Florence-based poet who has published seven poetry collections, as part of World Poetry/Prose Portfolio [WPP], curated by poet Sudeep Sen 

From The Guest in the Woods (Chelsea Editions, 2013) 
(translated from the Italian to English by Diana Thow, Sarah Stickney & Eugene Ostashevsky)

There’s another
child, one that won’t
grow,
who sits
darkly, eyes
two marbles —
a maquette —, who   
drones his
story
up through my
lungs,

who
leans his
head on my
heart
and leaves 
a hollow.     

*

When you find those long edges,
sheets of paper or blades of grass
where one touch is enough
to bring blood:
your words
aim for blind spots                
for the shadowy places              
thin and quiet as needles,

I was covered
without my knowing.


*

I translate your life
through feng shui, prescriptions

I glue your vocal chords back together
I tune the voice you had,
the language
that was written in your body

that was washed away with bleach, with wind, with dishwater 

I can read it to you                still
in those radiographies that you carry around
like your portfolio to the gallerists,

and in the dust at the bottom of the drawers
and left inside gloves

in all these years of acid rain,
that has cleaned your bones like silverware. 


*

You show me your wounds, like a soldier,
your battle
against another you consuming
your eyes, bones,
skin
who cut your tendons a while ago,
the cord that holds you,
diver who won’t resurface.

Mi mostri le ferite, da soldato
la tua battaglia
contro un'altra te che ti consuma
negli occhi, nelle ossa
nella pelle
che ha tagliato i tuoi tendini da tempo,
il filo tutto intero che ti tiene,
palombaro che più non risale.


*

The nerves mended
in the fog, the papers, the jackets
the interlaced fingers
(veins and arteries crossed)
and after the tension on the phone-line, in the pen:
the care-package cakes are active mines,
every noodle a knot, a new debt.

Your world stuck between the lenses,
you-building
collapsing in an instant. 

*

Between us voice
doesn’t travel like 
a hairdryer underwater
but it stops like
a switch,
turned on or off
at random. We two 
are a country
under embargo,
living on parentheses and
silences, on blackouts,
so that when the light
returns, we have already
forgotten what to say. 


*

nkondi


With all that 
metal 
inside you — world

magnet — you
attract me with fillings,
my bracelets.

I slip toward you, with
your marsupial weight
of pills, the

canned wrongs
undergone, to suck on
in winter for memory:

your lips shining with
that axe that exits
your mouth.


* * * 

in my dream
you are paring my nails
with your teeth: you made me,
you can unmake me,
                            one bite 
at a time.


*

i am
in your palm, with
eyes un-
buttoned
and tail
that cannot
knot:
good enough to eat.


*

and then i plugged the navel
with the hand

no light
to see me
at the end of
the ride, scattered
x's and y's,
marbles 
on the ground.


From The Plant of Dreaming (Xenos books, 2017)
(translated from the Italian by Eugene Ostashevsky)

La gita/The outing 


A wind whose geyser 
kneads me, that melts
my soles while 
I pick: what stone
recalls you, the sound
of what siren.

Now is the time 
of the mine, clay
grazing my head,
hard language,
lamp gone out.

Stairs in the rock
claw the bottom, where
skin sweats stones, 
gurgles the heart.

We go down the shaft
along a trail of pyrite 
crumbs, go down 
with our eyes, knees, go
down to trail
the trace, drop 
marking the rock, making
memory overflow.

(we melt with
the heat, drop by
drop, we knead 
back into the sea.

we meet again,
with knotted
eyelids).

I listen inside
to the supporting beams,
count the fuses
that enter the view,
gather us 
for the flight,
search for us
in the dark, in the heat.

I look for us two:
you, a cloud of memory,
me, escaping myself
like mercury,
tremor of a thermometer
I swallow, glass and all.

(A train from the dark,
a foot on each track,
an eye, blinded, that 
looks for you,
a train
in the dark, that waits for you.)

(…)

pulling the red
thread from your shoulder 
blade, following you 
in the earth 
bones 
beyond the frontier
of the lip,

us,
removed from light.

This, the labor
of cutting and filling,
what matter whether with stone

or word.

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