Two poems: Translated, from Italian, by Jennifer Scappettone

American Poetry Review, The, Jul/Aug 2002 by Rosselli, Amelia, Scappettone, Jennifer

seventy destitutes and a shirt that ripped itself up

in the null, by some caprice I lay back in the

null and all was laurel and beneficence, benefacted

the king of the poor, camel that would crawl. A rain

hard, thin, penetrated, in need of assistance

I penetrated rooms furnished to a real life

that with capital letters drew itself away from mine, courteously

obliging were the condemned to death. Invitations

crept along the rainy cornerstones of a city

permeable: not one hidden beast dusted

the goats that marched ecstatic upon the mounts of the

Trinity: a camel, two Indians and the people master

of all the arts, music and mathematics, the fury

of realizable dreams. Lost in the basin of shadows,

the white spiderwebs and the dust on the lashes--

specks and small pearls beneath a rain most wretched

settled for the best a life closed.

Two monkeys ploughed the soul of invisible traces,

the heart suffered it, old guard whiskered, corrupt,

drunk, tenacious, without hope and yet expecting the entire

curved sky in hand. The heart has a hand? you ask and

irony too with its hand (riddled with cookies)

draws or scratches an arabesque tremulous on the opaque hills

of the mind: irony is a needle, the tempests bathe with

opaque sorrows the lascivious blood, oh how the breath rushes

to lop off the guards! (here folly you managed a

sort of feast, released me).

AMELIA ROSSELLI (1930-1996) was a musician, music theorist, journalist, and poet. She is the author of ten volumes of poetry, including Serie ospedaliera (1969), from which these poems were drawn.

JENNIFER SCAPPETTONE is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is co-curating the 21st Century Poetics series. Her poems have appeared in the Boston Review.