Journal of Italian Translation

Gregory Pell/Davide Rondoni
And the other, ugly one, swollen
with medications, hat
pulled over his bald spot, crying
or maybe he’s just cried.
I read in the Railway magazine:
years of Michelangelo’s Pietà –
and see that incessant abandon
arms, a mother herself
still a girl, God’s boy sleeping
in that rapt whiteness.
Matter
that does not believe in its own being –
like these travelers,
in a slumber that amplifies
the train cars in the evening.
1498, five hundred
the long, white
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