Erminia Passannanti (Three poems translated by Michael Pickering)

 

Erminia Passannanti

(Three poems translated by Michael Pickering)

year 2000

"Dawn"

I had an upturned cart tonight
On the ridge of dawn
From which there rolled downhill
Sacks of grain
Against an orange sun, the mule
Had pulled himself up on his hooves
And went head bent limping
Down the bright line of day.
I pick up
At the foot of the ridge
A screaming sack, unloose
My corset, offer him my nipple.


"Valì"

You go about like a nymphet,
wrapped in your tinyness
with garlands, ribbons of paper and baskets,
or in the manner of a futurist princess,
projected into roseate distances

so present and yet so inaccessible
with your limpid eyes and gestures and little speeches
whispered to yourself alone
pattering on my high heels through the rooms,
a little sweet, a little haughty, like a goddess,
neat in your neat light:

six years,
comet, my comet,
you trailing behind your smiles
my golden hopes as you trail your veil.


"Isolde. Or the misadventure of existing" **

Arborescent branches. Wry neck,
Poisoned by the bite.
Pia mater. Dura mater
Seized with intruding cold through the sheer skin –
Body trembling. Alien.
Like a spider web vibrating – in the sun.

Only at times tears, proof that at times a fluid is exuded
From the most uncertain vein.
My dead retina. Photophobia. Fibre
That excluded my sight permanently.

Dura, dura mater.
No core. Belly of a spider
That deforms my (perhaps still immature)life
Flaking away. Emaciated.
Childless.

Liberating
Weeping of Isolde.
What does it mean?
It does not contradict itself.

So much accumulated grief
cries out.

So little would be needed to forestall
Isolde’s birth.

** "This is a poem written by the poetess after listening to a radio program that presented the case of an young woman suffering from a spinal malformation."