Illinois
Once upon a time
when rivers still used to be synonymous
with the language of make and take,
Cairo was far from being a ghost town.
When I was a child
I would spend hours on the banks
at the southmost edge of the city
watching, transfixed,
the Ohio and the Mississippi,
their two immense waters
become one.
I didn’t know then what a tributary was,
and when I learned
I found it all too arbitrary.
They should have renamed both,
or better just let them be!
No name at all!
I’m not sure why at the time
I shouted these words
against those words on my classroom wall.
I suppose I wondered
how can some chalk on a blackboard
be more true than what I’d witnessed?
Climbing at the edges was forbidden.
To frighten us, the elders used to talk
of the Drowner.
In our eyes blossomed the image
of an immense beast made of water,
who flattens and breathes and lurks.
I remember seeing three old men whispering in church:
but eyes wide open as if they were screaming,
gesturing wildly under a black marble angel
with closed eyes towering over them
like the solid shadow of their thinking.
The first time hatred handcuffed me was at the corner
between Commercial Avenue and Third
where it slammed me on the hood of a patrol car.
The second time it was me crying,
holding on to a white sink
like a steering wheel that doesn’t steer,
my wrists bright red from the cuffs.
When we were little kids gone fishing
and had to walk two miles up Commercial Avenue,
we would pass the cisterns
of Illinois-American Water
walking the tightrope of the spines of the tracks,
and finally a country road without a name.
The embankment ended just before Cairo
and the ruined shacks of Future City.
And the Ohio River behind that wall
was the restless coils of a dragon,
though he waited for us here at the riverbend
calm as a lake.
I remember my childhood as a lucid dream,
the fear and the game losing themselves in each other,
how that wall used to end
and start within one kingdom.
And don’t say that Cairo is a sign of the times.
It’s always been this way, and it doesn’t matter
if you think you know what you need.
And it doesn’t matter if you believe or not.
Every fearful word is prophecy.
Hell! We preached in bars all the time without even knowing.
Hell! We would even quote the Apocalypse of John
and the Old Testament without our knowing.
From time to time we used metaphors
like rise (sollevarci ) or wipe-out (spazzare via)
like the flood of filth against which we built walls
like to take for ourselves the land we’d been denied.
We used to speak like they’d spoken from within: both the river
and the Drowner.
/ / / / /
Illinois
Una volta
quando i fiumi rimavano
con parole come dare e portare,
Cairo era lungi dall’essere una città fantasma.
Quando ero bambino
passavo ore sull’argine
sulla punta più a sud del paese
guardando rapito
l’Ohio e il Mississipi
le loro immense masse d’acqua
diventare una.
Non sapevo ancora cosa fosse un affluente,
e quando lo imparai
lo trovai alquanto arbitrario.
Avrebbero dovuto rinominare entrambi,
o ancora meglio, avrebbero dovuto semplicemente lasciarli stare!
Nessun nome in assoluto!
Non sono sicuro perché al tempo
gridai quelle parole
contro quelle parole sulla parete della mia classe.
Credo mi stessi chiedendo:
come può del gesso su una lavagna
essere più vero di ciò che vedo?
Era vietato salire sull’argine.
I vecchi per farci paura
ci parlavano dell’Annegato.
Negli occhi mi era cresciuta l’immagine
di un animale immenso fatto d’acqua
che si appiatta e respira e si tende in agguato.
Ricordo in chiesa quei tre vecchi sussurrare
gli occhi spalancati come stessero urlando
gesticolare a strappi sotto un angelo di marmo nero
dagli occhi chiusi torreggiante su di loro
come l’ombra solida del loro pensiero.
La prima volta l’odio mi ammanetta all’angolo
tra la terza e Commercial Avenue
e mi sbatte sul cofano di una volante.
La seconda volta sono io che piango
e mi tengo al lavandino bianco
come a un volante che non sterza
i miei polsi cerchiati di rosso
come avessero un marchio.
Da ragazzini per pescare dovevamo camminare
due miglia su per Commercial Avenue
ci lasciavamo sulla destra le cisterne
dell’Illinois American Water
facendo i funamboli sugli scheletri dei binari
e infine una strada sterrata senza nome.
L’argine finiva poco prima di Cairo
e delle baracche in rovina di Future City.
E il fiume Ohio
che dietro al muro era le spire di un drago
qui invece ci aspettava nell’ansa
placido come un lago.
Ricordo la mia infanzia come un sogno lucido
la paura e il gioco perdersi l’una nell’altro
come quel muro finire
e iniziare in un unico regno.
E non dire che Cairo è un segno dei tempi
se così è stato da sempre e non importa
se credi di sapere di cosa hai bisogno.
E non importa se credi o non credi
ogni parola di paura è profezia.
Diavolo! Nei bar senza saperlo era tutta un omelia.
Diavolo! Citavamo a volontà l’Apocalisse di Giovanni
e l’Antico Testamento senza saperlo.
Di volta in volta si usavano immagini
come “rise” sollevarci o “wipe out” spazzare via
come piena sudiciume contro cui innalzare argini
come prenderci la terra che ci avevano negato.
Parlavamo come in noi parlasse il fiume
e l’Annegato.
* * * * *
Pietro Federico is an Italian poet who lives in Rome. His poetry collection, La Maggioranza delle Stelle (Most of the Stars) — 50 poems, one for each American state, was published in Italy last year by Edizione Ensemble. The poems are, by turns and combinations, poems of history, personality, desire, spirituality, freedom, suffering, identity, Eros, beauty, nature, and more, as varied as the landscapes and people of the United States. The poems are akin to Federico Garcia Lorca’s Poet in New York in its famously surreal and wide-eyed look at the country, its examination of not just New York but other landscapes, its singular voice (even though multiple voices arise), its deep spiritual quest, and its startling imagery. But Pietro is his own unique poet. I doubt there is anyone writing poems like this in Italy. It seems to me that we Americans take for granted many of the things that Pietro is able to see in this body of work, especially our own history. There is something of many of our best poets in his work: William Carlos Williams, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Langston Hughes, Wendell Berry, just to name a few. Many of Pietro’s poems in this book rhyme intermittently, and I have tried to play with that sonic quality by rhyming in my translations as well as other linguistic mirroring.