My Poems Won’t Change the World Read online

  Patrizia Cavalli

  * * *

  MY POEMS WON’T CHANGE THE WORLD

  Selected Poems

  Edited by Gini Alhadeff

  Contents

  FROM Le mie poesie non cambieranno il mondo

  My Poems Won’t Change the World (1974) “Someone told me”

  “Together eternity and death threaten me”

  “I comb my hair”

  “Before when you left you would always forget”

  “Life goes on like before”

  “What do I care if your nose is all swollen”

  “But first we must free ourselves”

  “The Moroccans with the carpets”

  FROM Il cielo

  The Sky (1981) “Ah yes, to your misfortune”

  “When one finds one’s self unexpectedly selected by health”

  “You no longer play, you only eat”

  “Eating a Macintosh apple”

  “I had cut my hair, darkened my eyebrows”

  “Now that time seems all mine”

  “You arrive like this, as always”

  “Let death come to me wrapped in a wish”

  “There’s no point in trying”

  “As though out of register”

  “After years of torment years of regret”

  “Two hours ago I fell in love”

  FROM L’io singolare proprio mio

  The All Mine Singular I (1992) “Onto your sea my ship set sail”

  “Having reached the point where memory”

  “If you knocked now on my door”

  The Atlantic Day

  “O lord, lend me virtue”

  “The body was a sheet it laid itself out”

  “Again it has prepared itself for my awakening”

  “To get out of prison do you really need”

  “Don’t count on my imagination, no”

  “Thinking about you”

  “Now wine in my blood I turn again”

  “Just hearing a verb”

  “We’re all going to hell in a while”

  “This was the mother I wanted”

  “Vacant head. Uninhabited shut woods”

  “Chair, stop being such a chair!”

  “Something that the object never can take in”

  “You sit at the head of the table”

  “Now it’s sure, the world doesn’t exist”

  “At first the little thought was easy”

  “Christmas. Festival of light”

  “ ‘I’m going, but where? Oh gods!’ ”

  “Scientifically I wonder”

  “A narcissist no more, vanity gone”

  FROM Sempre aperto teatro

  The Forever Open Theater (1999) “O loves—true or false”

  “I am the mild and obedient nurse”

  “When, thanks to the virtues of wine”

  “Oh really, she’s with somebody?”

  “But those kids with twisted legs”

  “In the seething almost Indian heat”

  “No, love surely isn’t a feeling”

  “Stopping suddenly, no destination”

  “How I was there and maybe there was a river”

  “The sadness of creaking limbs!”

  “Fresco of the underwater night”

  “How sweet it was yesterday imagining I was a tree!”

  “Everyone has a mystery”

  “But you, are you Christians?”

  “I those isotopes don’t want to drink”

  “Suddenly as if it were a cold”

  “I walked full of myself and very strong”

  “The season is inviting me. Which season is”

  “One breath, partial but complete”

  “If I turn my desk around”

  “These lovely sheaves of poetry I find”

  Therapy

  “What is lost is returned to me”

  FROM Pigre divinità e pigra sorte

  Lazy Gods, Lazy Fate (2006) “My landscape, which I thought was limitless”

  “Here I am, I do my bit”

  “Whoever boards a train is tested”

  “Lame pigeon. Ridiculous”

  “The more bored you are, the more attached you get”

  Lazy Gods, Lazy Fate

  “This sabbatical time”

  “Almost always when we hear that someone’s died”

  “Look!”

  “O stay where you are! Here”

  “Surely it’s ridiculous maybe even scandalous”

  “I want my own good, what can I do about it?”

  “Every fair November day”

  “The air smelled of a fire that had just gone out”

  “I fall and fall again, stumble and fall, get up”

  “Throw in the pasta, I’m on my way!”

  “We were all forgiven”

  “To look at beauty and never make it yours”

  “I’ve become very wise”

  “Always wanting to understand. You can’t”

  “The streets are hot, the voices in the way”

  “It’s pretty clear, I’m dying”

  “How life tries! It knows”

  “Incapable of love, Physiological Love”

  “It isn’t true that Cupid flits about”

  “The sky is blue again today”

  Pockets

  “O to eat tangerines”

  The Keeper

  “To be animal for the grace”

  “Love not mine not yours”

  “I became good. And like a goody-goody”

  “So, let’s see how you flower”

  “Love was winning me over”

  “I was at peace and now I’m doomed”

  “Very simple love that believes in words”

  “It’s all so simple, yes, it was so simple”

  “You want me to be like one of your cats”

  “Isn’t it amazing that one evening”

  “There she is turned into a lollipop”

  “What a meager world is mine that always needs you”

  “I cannot love what you are, no”

  “Just like last year, yes, between the twenty-third”

  “I think I want, but what is it I want?”

  Afterword

  About the Translators

  Index of Titles and First Lines

  Permissions Acknowledgments

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS

  MY POEMS WON’T CHANGE THE WORLD

  Patrizia Cavalli was born in Todi, Umbria, and lives in Rome. She has written six collections of poetry: Le mie poesie non cambieranno il mondo (My Poems Won’t Change the World); Il cielo (The Sky); Poesie (1974–1992) (Poems (1974–1992)); Sempre aperto teatro (The Forever Open Theater); Pigre divinità e pigra sorte (Lazy Gods, Lazy Fate); and Datura. She has also published translations of Shakespeare and Molière.

  Gini Alhadeff is the author of a memoir, The Sun at Midday: Tales of a Mediterranean Family, and a novel, Diary of a Djinn. She was born in Alexandria, Egypt, to Italian parents. She is completing Magic Horn, a novel about a Swiss-American psychiatrist and her therapeutic sculpture garden at Bellevue Hospital.

  Translations by:

  Gini Alhadeff

  Judith Baumel

  Geoffrey Brock

  Moira Egan and Damiano Abeni

  Jonathan Galassi

  Jorie Graham

  Kenneth Koch

  J. D. McClatchy

  David Shapiro

  Susan Stewart and Brunella Antomarini

  Mark Strand

  Rosanna Warren

  FROM

  M
Y POEMS WON’T CHANGE THE WORLD 1974

  * * *

  Le mie poesie non cambieranno il mondo

  TO ELSA

  Someone told me

  of course my poems

  won’t change the world.

  I say yes of course

  my poems

  won’t change the world.

  GINI ALHADEFF

  Together eternity and death threaten me:

  neither of the two do I know,

  neither of the two will I know.

  JUDITH BAUMEL

  I comb my hair

  to unwind,

  ready or not

  here I am.

  Behind the bottle

  the cat’s whiskers,

  I’ll send off those

  references later.

  I put on a hat,

  look in the mirror,

  I’m expecting a visit expecting

  the doorbell to ring.

  Those sleepy dark lovely eyes …

  But no love-talk—

  I can’t take it.

  As for love, I just

  want to make it.

  GEOFFREY BROCK

  Before when you left you would always forget

  your perfume, your best handkerchief,

  your new pants, your gifts for friends,

  your gloves, your boots and your umbrella.

  This time you left

  a pair of Puerto Rico yellow

  underpants.

  JUDITH BAUMEL

  Life goes on like before—

  people standing, sitting,

  and walking.

  GINI ALHADEFF

  What do I care if your nose is all swollen.

  I have to clean the house.

  GINI ALHADEFF

  But first we must free ourselves

  from the strict stinginess that produces us,

  that produces me on this chair

  in the corner of a café

  awaiting with the ardor of a clerk

  the very moment in which

  the small blue flames of the eyes

  across from me, eyes familiar

  with risk, will, having taken aim,

  lay claim to a blush

  from my face. Which blush they will obtain.

  GEOFFREY BROCK

  The Moroccans with the carpets

  seem like saints

  but they’re salesmen.

  KENNETH KOCH

  FROM

  THE SKY 1981

  * * *

  Il cielo

  TO OKAPI BANDIERINA

  You were never sentimental and out of love I’d like to be like you.

  Ah yes, to your misfortune,

  instead of leaving

  I stayed in bed.

  I, sole mistress of the house,

  closed the door,

  drew the blinds.

  And outside, the four caged

  canaries sounded like four forests

  and four thousand voices reawakening

  confused by the return of light.

  But beyond the door

  in the dark halls, in the nearly

  empty rooms that capture

  the furthest sounds,

  the pitiful steps of languid homecomings,

  births and hazards were kindled,

  indifferent and shady deaths

  were consumed.

  And what do you think, that I couldn’t see you

  die around a corner

  with the glass falling from your hands

  your neck red and swollen

  a little ashamed

  to have been surprised

  yet another time

  after so much time

  in the same position, the same condition,

  pale, trembling, filled with excuses?

  But then if I really think about your death

  in whatever house, hotel or hospital bed,

  in whatever street, perhaps in air

  or in a tunnel; about your eyes that surrender

  to the invasion; about the ultimate terrible lie

  with which you will want to repulse the attack

  or the infiltration; about your blood pulsing hesitant

  and frantic in the final immense vision

  of a passing insect, of a fold in the sheet,

  of a stone or a wheel

  that will survive you

  well then, how can I let you go away?

  JUDITH BAUMEL

  When one finds one’s self unexpectedly selected by health,

  one’s gaze does not trip, won’t inadvertently stick,

  but faintly wondrously grows attached

  to hard matter, still matter, that leavening,

  where images are swallowed up, where they slip down into one, easy,

  as into this cat which clenches its eyes just now to greet me.

  The sounds dissolve: the cries the sirens:

  they shall simply be. The raveling fabrics of odors

  carry in themselves to us

  all depths of field, disappearance, memory,

  making up sound, making voice sing

  song that forces itself through morning traffic

  through rudeness crowd.

  Yes we were born

  for this terrible assonance.

  But the city gives you, always, unexpectedly,

  here and there, out of nowhere, and immediately, its stench,

  burnt oil, fried food, to send you home.

  JORIE GRAHAM

  You no longer play, you only eat,

  Yet your neck is so thin.

  And you are covered with fleas!

  J. D. MCCLATCHY

  Eating a Macintosh apple

  she showed me her crumpled lips.

  And afterwards she didn’t know what to do

  she couldn’t even discard

  that small mangled thing that more and more

  turned yellow in her hand.

  And daylight’s the time to get drunk

  when the body still waits for surprises

  from light and from rhythm,

  when it still has the energy

  to invent a disaster.

  DAVID SHAPIRO WITH GINI ALHADEFF

  I had cut my hair, darkened my eyebrows,

  adjusted the right fold of my mouth, thinned

  my body, raised my height. I had even lent

  the shoulders a triumphant bent. A girl

  boy

  again, on the streets, a workman’s gait,

  no superfluous embellishments. But I hadn’t forgotten

  the languor of the chair, a clouded vision.

  And I distributed caresses, not knowing I did. My secret

  body untouchable. In the lower back

  expectation condensed without satisfaction; in the gardens

  long walks, advice repeated,

  the sky sometimes blue

  sometimes not.

  GINI ALHADEFF

  Now that time seems all mine

  and no one calls me for lunch or dinner,

  now that I can stay to watch

  how a cloud loosens and loses its color,

  how a cat walks on the roof

  in the immense luxury of a prowl, now

  that what waits for me every day

  is the unlimited length of a night

  where there is no call and no longer a reason

  to undress in a hurry to rest inside

  the blinding sweetness of a body that waits for me,

  now that the morning never has a beginning

  and silently leaves me to my plans,

  to all the cadences of voice, now

  suddenly I would like prison.

  JUDITH BAUMEL

  You arrive like this, as always,

  to spread the suspicion of paradise,

  and before I open the window

  I know you from the gentler light,

  from the dust that hangs in the air,

  fr
om the birds’ obsessive performance,

  and if it weren’t the birds it would be something else,

  for you have your specialties for every place;

  and when you come in and I surrender my senses

  I’m living in unfamiliar houses again and feeling nostalgia

  for things that never occurred. And across your labyrinths

  you hang the continents and seasons on my back

  and I become the wall of shouts and reflections

  the platform flights take off from

  till the silent eddies of summer.

  JONATHAN GALASSI

  Let death come to me wrapped in a wish

  past a door, or

  I couldn’t bear it if gently gently

  from my eyes

  or from my memory the pale blue sheet

  the white blanket, the dazzling light

  that lit up the room were to withdraw.

  Unlike the black and white cat

  I see slowly dying trapped

  in his travels when he stops,

  surprising himself, to regain

  his bearings towards a certain chair

  a certain radiator and looking to the right a little

  and to the left proceeds towards a wall

  which was not part of his plan.

  But still in his powers, if you touch

  his head or say his name,

  is the famous explosion of purrs.

  All my grandmother had left was a nervous

  quality, a distaste for others,

  the certain memory of her dislikes.

  GINI ALHADEFF

  There’s no point in trying

  to become more adult, more mature,

  take an interest in the many fates

  of the world in the papers