Visiting Petrarch’s House
A friend invites me to Petrarch’s house.
It’s in Arquà, a villa from the thirteenth century,
its frescoes celebrating the virtues
of Sappho and Cleopatra.
Time’s methodical hourglass
stuns me, the endless sand
carrying me back
to beloved Laura’s death.
Songs bearing laurels and diamond tiaras.
Paths lined with thorns and tributes.
Girls pale and cold as marble-haired angels
with no need for hydrogen pyroxide.
Love divided between two bodies.
What am I supposed to do in a museum?
Place my flower in Petrarch’s window?
Caress the walls from outside?
Make a bracelet of all my failures?
I’ll go as one who searches for fossils of prehistoric seals,
makes a study of dinosaurs or whales,
photographs the skeletons of turtles.
What would Petrarch have done with a love like mine.
How would he have sung a love like ours.
Hands on Mother
A man
hits a woman
in my memory.
Since childhood
mine is a world without God.
I see the clouds,
the way he wields the strength of his arms,
the woman cries, and the torment
destroys my every scene.
How can you doubt
that a trace of nothingness exists?
I mend seams in my dreams
from such madness.
Nocturnal Meditation
Looking at the railroad tracks
from a distance life seems to us
a stupor of to dos,
of cars with unexpected guards,
of country and city roundabouts.
But the curves of the night are enough
to find shelter within
and in its pulse of sleeping syllables
listen to what matters, the presence
of a daughter in her room
or how to explain a farewell.
This will be because calm nests in the tendons
with a mirrored purpose
and restores color to what’s been forgotten.
Give us the exact number needed
to adjust to a pain.
Painting of Sky with Silhouettes
I imagined you combing the branches of the willows.
Hand up, faintly outstretched.
Head resting between my legs.
Another way to pass through my windows,
open and blue sea.
I saw you come home late from a trip.
You fixed yourself tea while talking to me
of the last raid in the Middle East,
of a landscape of waves and the summer
surfs to come.
A camellia bloomed in the painting
and my name reverberated, a gentle wind,
held within your voice.
It wasn’t a dream, darling. Seemed
a scene as real as a memory.
How truthful, at times, nostalgia
like nothing we have ever been
or ever will be.
Translated by Jacqueline Kolosov
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