My Poems Won’t Change the World
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