Journal of Italian Translation

Michael Palma/Giovanni Raboni
it all begins to fade, but then again
perhaps it’s changing color, as the moon
rising in its somber splendor soon
is warmed in time’s fine dust, and only then
do you dare to say how beautiful a thing
it really was—more beautiful than spring.
There was never a time when I was twice your age.
What am I saying? Of course there was such a time,
only you weren’t here, you were, let’s see,
in Padua, maybe Venice, intent on some
of your history as an irresistible
twenty-two-year-old—and really in the end
what does it matter what calculus or charm
transformed the young girl that you were into
the regrettably young woman that you’ll be
for as long as I’m alive, a sick man who
to keep from losing you has managed now
for twenty years not to die. Don’t leave me now,
don’t leave me first, I sometimes seem to hear,
but which heart speaks, and to which one of us?
They beat him bloody, though not to death
the halfwit son of the woman
who owned the local flower shop
because he went around whistling “Giovinezza”
two, no more than three
days before April 25.
Was he a Fascist? Of course he was—the way
that those who pounded him
were one of them from Masnago and the rest
from Induno: by being born there.
Never would those of us who were from those parts
be so atrociously innocent again.
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