Translated from the Italian
by Jamie McKendrick
There's a moment when the body
gathers itself in breathing
and thought stops and hesitates.
Likewise things
tugged by the moon
undergo the influence of
the tidal sigh, the malleable eclipse.
And the boats' planks
swell gently in water.
=
Summertime, like the cinemas, I shut up shop.
Thought flies off elsewhere and evaporates.
Billboards write white,
the air's warm,
the table weighted with fruit.
=
Often the page lies becalmed.
It's futile turning it to find
what quarter the wind
might blow from.
Nothing moves.
Thought wavers in that calm.
What navigation wrecked
is there, being
painfully repaired.
Fibonacci
I note the forehead's curvature
in its utter nakedness
and deduce the same number
that underwrites
how branches grow,
a church's poised facade,
the snail-shell spiral,
and the form of leaves.
=
I should like, one day,
to be turned to marble,
to be stripped of nerves,
glistening tendons, veins.
Just to be airy enamel,
slaked lime, the striped
tunic of a wind
ground to a halt.
=
On the beach, rotten wood, tires, bottles,
sodden stuff — all things wrecked
and putrified — I love them all:
what's washed up, spewed out, good-for-nothing,
what no one wants
to have or filch.
In April the air
takes on a hint of warmth.
Glows like a cheek.
=
This writing's being worn away,
its angles smoothed, the "r"s,
the "m"s, are turned
and sanded down and roll like stones
the currents shift from shore to shore.
Faces also,
faces waste away
from the pressure of being watched.
They turn into a landscape
full of ruins.
Games: Rebus
A world without time.
Without a breeze.
Everything is still
and exhaustingly full of meaning.
There's no end of meaning and sheer slog
in this worksite of sense.
Every word is a gravelly roadbed
of letters and figures.
Everything weighs a ton.
________________
Valerio Magrelli
Vanishing Point
Farrar Straus Giroux
