TRANSLATED FROM THE ITALIAN BY REBECCA LUNDIN AND ANDREA SIROTTI

Image used for Representation

FROM OPEN FOR INVENTORY (2109, Pequod)

I think sleep is wasted time.
So, every night, I imagine
going out,
into the empty streets
where the traffic lights
flame orange
and the puddles
have an ancient tremor.
Then, on reaching the waterfront
I’d stay for hours
listening to the sea that speaks
with the silver language of the fish.

Still unfulfilled,
I would go up, all the way to Conero,
where someone could mistake me
for a shaman,
to the point of asking me how to fix
a toothache
a headache
and all other illnesses,
including the one
that some nights wakes you up, speaks,
which we still don’t know
what name to give.

When you went to the hospital,
I started.
I was alone in the house
and drank every once in a while,
drank red wine,
it helped me not to think.
I only thought of the wine
that was in the fridge
and could go bad
if I didn’t drink it.
I came back from my walk at seven
and drank,
watched TV and drank,
fooled around on the internet
and drank.
Until you went under the knife,
I was more agitated than you
and kept drinking.
Bacardi this time.
While the surgeon opened your chest,
I finished all the Bacardi
at the supermarket.
So now you
have a new heart
while I,
I drink only Bacardi.

***

LAST NIGHT

We were in that place in the middle of the mountains,
where they farm trout, remember?
And you, in the grass around the pools,
right there, among the trout rippling the water,
you found a flute.
Crystal, all around,
the mountains bounced the echo of your notes
and the trout slowly started
to fly in the sky, like birds.

Replace the file? Sure, but not just that.
I’d like to replace my face sometimes
with a more smiling expression,
instead I always think of problems, my problems,
even when I don’t have any.
And I’d like to replace the house, this house
with a different one, so close to the sea that
I can nearly touch it, a Flemish tapestry,
a dishwasher at last, and a balcony
where I can invite friends over for a chat
about how great the last trip was,
the one we still haven’t made.
And I’d like to change my clothes, too,
to find pants that fit properly,
such beautiful shoes that everyone goes oooh
they turn to look at them and ask me
where on earth I got them.
Sure, I’d like to change a lot of things,
too many, maybe, but the heart, you know,
still stays on the left
and you’re there, inside that heart, keeping it alive,
you water it as if it were a cyclamen,
you turn it into a pocket for emotions
and then
you bounce it around like a ball.

It feels good, so good
inside the blue of your eyes
that while you speak with the others
I get lost
actually it seems to me
I am there inside,
like in a jacuzzi.
So you know what I’ll do,
I might just tell them and invite them too
and organize drinks there
with olives, potato chips, nuts
Seventies music
and a sunset worth seeing
like those in the Caribbean.
Then, drinks finished,
everyone returns home
to pick up the threads of the conversation,
to sleeping pills, bills, the line at the post office,
but who cares
even years later,
meeting in the street,
everyone remembers that day,
that day when
we had drinks
in the jacuzzi of your eyes.

He gets lost in the pages of the TV guide
and an old Seventies film,
while twirling a pen
with his fingers.
He would like to sleep but cannot,
he would like to smoke, but cannot
even do that,
he can only go through a phone book
where the phone numbers
are reminders of a time, a lifetime ago:
the summer nights on a Vespa
the beachfront seemed
like arriving at the moon,
then the girls snuck out in plaid
and already knew what to do.
They were years of hitchhiking
and unpaid tickets,
of lighters and hurried sex,
and afterwards, after making love,
behind the rocks or in the changing rooms,
writing “forever” in the sand,
before the waves did their job.
Now, though, the night doorman
is there, alone,
recording arrivals and departures
and telling stories
to avoid closing his eyes.
But in the end he always falls asleep,
more or less at dawn,
when the first shutters
inaugurate the morning
and faceless voices
chase each other down the street,
as if they too were
inside a dream,
which they don’t know how to leave,
and can’t.

FROM WHEN THE AIR WAS AFRAID OF NUREYEV (Terra d’ulivi, 2021)

Going to the Conero in winter,
when magpies don’t fly
and not even a trace of a tourist.
Here we go. Along the little road
leading to the restaurant parking lot,
we look at each other as if to say
What have we come here for?
But it’s just a moment, we start down.
We walk along the path
being careful not to fall.
Few words, the odd felled
tree. Inside the trunks, the concentric
circles of a past
to synchronize on.
In a moment, we’ve reached the bottom.
A purplish horizon line.
All around, the beach is defaced,
not only by cans, bottles,
but by our very being there,
half-smiling.
Our pupils still, like monoliths.
And the promontory shrouded
by the foggy lethargy of January.
It’s like being in a fjord, I say.
Then we slide
into a spell
where every word overhangs
and an invisible thread runs through us
from one atrium to another.

***

INSOMANIA

When I confessed to you that for a while
I would like to sleep alone,
you did not take it well, looking at me
with eyes of a stray:
that gaze, one shock after
the other, convulsed my heart…
Yes, little by little, I felt it crack,
in a cluster of earthquakes without end.

Call the firefighters, then
the emergency management agency
the first responders,
I said to myself,
and the firefighters the emergency management agency
the first responders
all agreed
on a quick reverse.

So, I confided in you that the dark circles
weren’t so bad
when you put on your striped shirt,
that in the end I could take a nap
after lunch, too
and you smiled,
sending the firefighters police doctors home
and I felt like a tourniquet, a joint,
the air finally back to normal.

***

THREE PEOPLE IN THREE ROOMS

You in bed,
with the never-ending sleep of children,
have breath that smells of roses,
at seventy
you move eyes and fingers
as if surprised, as if life
would bring you another childhood.
There, she, too, closed in her room,
your caretaker,
tinkers with something,
looks in the drawers,
puts away clothes, I don’t know,
is busy with her
staying by your side,
in a calculation of days
of which, for inertia, she has lost count.
Finally me.
I’m in the bathroom
and I look at myself in the mirror,
I see myself older than I’d like:
the first grey hairs,
temples more blue,
made blue by a sky
that blinds even the tiles.
Cold water, I turn it on,
feel it run under my fingers,
and while it runs, keeps running,
from one thought to another
I say to myself
that I would very much like a truce.

***

IN SARNANO

That day we went
to take a tour of the waterfalls
at the first we were already tired.
Turning I noticed
the drenched forehead,
the perplexed look,
the wide steps of someone who
prefers a comfortable armchair.
But we kept going,
you sacrificed yourself,
because I was curious
to see the second, the third,
I wanted jets of water
in my face,
to smell the scent of musk
of the undergrowth.
And so, reaching the last one,
I had hoped
that for you behind the waterfall
would appear the phrase “Thank you”
with rhinestones and capital letters,
instead nothing appeared
and I, too, was not able
to say anything,
as always,
like all the times
I don’t speak
and a caress remains between my hands.

Notes:

Conero: A headland located along the Adriatic Sea in Italy

Sarnano: A mountain town in Marche, in central Italy

Also, read The Plimsoll Line by Fabiano Alborghetti, translated into English by Christina Vitti, and published in The Antonym:

The Plimsoll Line— Fabiano Alborghetti