Journal of Italian Translation

Michael Palma/Giovanni Raboni
and dispassionate like him—to understand
why it was proper procedure to apply even to wages, to
the heads
of the laborers, the law of supply and demand.
Little Boy Dead of Exhaustion Etc.
1
The door closed behind him, in the darkness,
somewhere
between five and six years old enduring
an increase of eyes, out of nowhere,
in his back and—the ceiling rolling over on the floor
and here, and here, out on the landing (the door
closed behind him from inside) what else is there to do
but look for a way out with his head, that is to say,
jammed between rail and rail, on the emptiness of the
stairs
struggling and failing to work it free again,
scrupulously stopping
the beating of his heart
with an infarction: just like the grownups; it’s one of
their ways.
Now that you’ve told me about him I can see
how the little boy came to die:
a medium-sized blood clot on the bottom
of the tub. And you, if by some chance you were
to faint, if no one else was there
then you might bleed to death. For which
behavior, you sentimentally suggest,
he really should be thanked, no amiable
or brutal quack having lifted a single finger there
to willingly (according to our will) scrape it away.
That’s how, I imagine, they go about
producing a holy card, a lovely, propitiatory image
to hang from the other side of the bed in symmetry
with all the ones already pinned up there...
3
She made too much love, later on, it seems
she said to you; it seems
2
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