Journal of Italian Translation - Brooklyn College - Academic Home ...

Fabris/Giacomini 151
Not Returning to Varmo
It’s years since I’ve been back.
I don’t need to know
if the courtyard gate still grates,
if they’ve cut down the beautiful magnolia,
nor to see again the wall
dense with niter and the tracings
of the ivy’s dessicated heart veins –
and no need again to enter the abandoned house
that had a larder once
and granary stocked with laughter.
In the bitter, sure assurance that I live
It Looks Like Winter
Encysted in the heart already
the memory of sun.
The grass has become grayer
by Dogâl.
The wind lofts gulls up from the sea,
fleeting as rags or thoughts,
real only in their raucous crying.
The water in the marshes
reflects birds’ eyes no longer
but abandoned nests.
Here nothing more will come,
nothing more can ever come.
The shepherd’s staff scrapes its yesterday’s
history on the sky’s overcast.
Better perhaps
not to have loved you any more.
Already dissipating in the heart
the memory of sun.
Why? Are we near sunset?
It could be. Soon, a night,
we could be in winter.