Civitella Library, Italian Section

By DIANE MEHTA

 

In the operatic corner in the library,
Italian dialects heckle one another—
whose language is honey
on the tongue and who has disjointed
heads off syllables on the pikes of the invaders—
“Ma ti, vècio parlar, rezìsti.”
(“But you, old idiom, resist,” Zanzotto says.)
Everything dopo, not a centralizing now but the truer after—

We grow old and brittle as these pages
turning on the shelf,
looking for meaning in languages
bigger than our tongues.

Italians in the corner mutter among themselves
while we scrawl our names in the ledger,
a book of history about what,
over many years, people cared about.
They see us march off with armfuls of books,
elated to create the annual harvest of ourselves,
and shake their heads, so many of them
untranslated; so much there is trellising the lyrical
sense we flutter off with.

Answers you seek hide in pages that love you not.
Spines creak open anyway between my hands.

Mosca of Montale’s heart
announces herself at the market.
He has numbered all his conversations to her
in poems saturated with loss so alive
she herself picks the fruit he desires that evening—
prickle pears and fennel go home with him
—just a few nights until the almond cake is ready.
Always this system of enduring and making do with.

Sentences stage a riot. They insist they are primary,
not primitive. Susurrations of the sublime in scribblings
untranslated, seeking transit of the life and not the page.

 

Diane Mehta is the author of an essay collection, Happier Far, and two poetry books, Tiny Extravaganzas and Forest with Castanets. She is poet in residence and the New Chamber Ballet in New York City.

[Purchase Issue 25 here.]

From the beginning, The Common has brought you transportive writing and exciting new voices. We are committed to supporting writers and maintaining free, unrestricted access to our website, but we can’t do it without you. Become an integral part of our global community of readers and writers by donating today. No amount is too small. Thank you!

Civitella Library, Italian Section

Related Posts

Cover of All Is The Telling by Rosa Castellano

An Embodied Sense of Time: Raychelle Heath Interviews Rosa Castellano

ROSA CASTELLANO
I’m holding a blank page all the time for myself. That’s a truth that I choose to believe in: the blank page is a tool for our collective liberation. It can be how we keep going. I love that we can find each other on the page and heal each other, too. So, I invoke that again and again, for myself, because I need it.

Cloudy sunset over field.

Florida Poems

EDWARD SAMBRANO III
I will die in Portland on an overcast day, / The Willamette River mirroring clouds’ / Bleak forecast and strangers not forgetting— / Not this time—designer raincoats in their closets. / They will leave for work barely in time / To catch their railcars. It will happen / On a day like today.