Translated by Pina Piccolo from the Italian collection Lo spettro di casa, Puntoacapo, 2024. Cover image: Book cover of Lo spettro di casa.
THE HOLE IN TIME
(or the ghost and the girl)
1. A glance at the corner outside
between the window frames
An uncertain gesture haunts as it waits
observing the yolk of the inside
projected from years to come
A mammalian suction from the hole
Everything that is born – it thinks –
produces heat
2. Heat trails linger – it thinks –
like ropes stretched between walls
They stand out over time
as thin, suspended threads
Their mark is not erased as tenants
move out, relocate
the body migrates through digressions
the peripheries of language
4. The bedroom is sizzling
pink flowers on the wallpaper
a poster of a young Jim Morrison
hanging on the wardrobe door
The light from the blue bulb
is as transparent as skin
Images look liquid in the
underwater cabin of bedsheets
9. Your voice always too loud,
too clumsy your grip on things
too awkward your movements
feminine grace unknown
chastised the allure of gender
despite the barbie colors
Yet if needed you are a woman – it laughs –
how many wrecks to dive into
13. Whenever voices speak, the hollow hours
of spite crumble under the skin
waves crash against temples,
darting, rising, flashing as they fall
a loneliness like an endless steppe
age thirteen is a tent against the wind
but a line is drawn over the games
anything unsung is dull land
15. The figure reflected on the glass is a blurring
soot comings and goings multiplying delusions
of belonging but the ghost shakes its head
retrospective wisdom is but a burnt match
Wrong questions under abstruse dawns
drawing flocks of fleeing birds
inside a muddy nest
that embarrassing need for love
17. Faces fall like leaves
from the strange trees of time
the typhoon from outside knocks
and knocks, but the inside is a museum
of abandoned classrooms of letters
written to distant rock stars
of angels and insects on the white typewriter
magnetic fields of buzzing and wings
21. Age thirteen is a tiny death
a breech birthing of oneself
a knife stripping the hour bare
It tunes to the songs of streetlamps
hatching new allergies new roles
Stray records turn as they dam in
skeletal stilts of notes on the newly
dredged river of childhood
IN THE DAZZLING YEAR
(or the ghost and I)
scroll through the days you can perhaps feel the matter they are made of although
the trope we use to call it life is not enough
to explain how touch retracts in the presence of plasma
smoldering at unimaginable temperatures like those that prevailed
back then before time before the split a few microseconds
after the big bang trapped energy frustrated by the sheath
we are wrapped in feeling the shaking of plasma
despite accidents governed by the inexorable rhythm
of necessity the one that whips traps energy and then
it is inevitable that temperatures don’t coincide with those inside
the mood and it is so easy to slip fall into the low orbit
of routine of the obtuse privilege of no longer changing
while instead we are seduced and pushed by the sheath
into changing direction depending on breath icy spin
nearby but not there yet a touch away from absolute zero
numbers hold within them the coincidence of false and true of great
and infinitesimal the echo and the icon in numbers there is a peace that blasts away
stagnant overflowing liquid from the veins a peace that is missing in that
grumpy pall that is the dictionary like when evening falls upon the pier
and a solitary windsurfer lets himself be levitated by the wake
beyond where a human hull could have made it whole beyond
where the fresh porticos of memory stretch out even beyond
where no cloud in sight a summer of pause has started capable
of slowing down breath. in numbers there is also the hurricane but
a good one that wakes olive trees on the slope and makes them brothers
of the evening that falls on the pier and the doors float in the silence
like what imminent secrets of surprised lips then you can count
on numbers count on their curtain. a surprise
that is truer than fire
sometimes it is so strange to be a body occupying a defined space here
not there or elsewhere anywhere one senses the touch of something solid
an unwanted ground and not to float in continuity sometimes it feels
more innate spontaneous even unconscious to experience tribulation
together with the rest of the invisible, stubborn yet in its own way not only in space
but even more in that gravitational conversion associated with space
time the evaporating flow of events sensing the tribulation of the
tectonic plates rafts carrying oceans to sink panting with the ocean pits
bearing the pressure of environments that have never known
photosynthesis surrounded by toothed extensions and luminescent antennas
it is so strange sometimes to not know where the landslide will strike to see it
crashing down before the mud seduces the lane to know
the ruined estates settled again the extinguished breaths started again all the ghostly hills
the hybridized machinery the exploded helium at the end
of the main sequence
Maria Luisa Vezzali (Bologna, 1964) teaches literature in high school. She has published the poetry collections L'altra eternità (Edizioni del Laboratorio, 1987), Eleusi marina (in Terzo quaderno italiano, edited by F. Buffoni, Guerini e Associati 1992), dieci nell'uno (Eidos 2004), lineamadre (Donzelli 2007, Anterem/Montano Prize), Forme implicite (Allemandi 2011), Tutto questo (puntoacapo 2018, Don Luigi Di Liegro Prize 2020). She is a member of the jury for the Bologna Prize for Literature. As a translator, she has worked on Adrienne Rich (Cartografie del silenzio, Crocetti 20202, and La guida nel labirinto, Crocetti 20212) and Lorand Gaspar (Conoscenza della luce, Donzelli 2006). In 2011, she edited an edition of Saint-John Perse's Anabasi for Raffaelli press. She is a member of the Orlando feminist association and the WiT (Women in Translation) collective of translators, which produced Audre Lorde, D'amore e di lotta (Le Lettere, 2018). www.marialuisavezzali.com
