Poetry |

“Illinois”

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.

Contributor
John Poch

John Poch’s most recent collection of poetry is Texases (WordFarm 2019). He teaches creative writing and literature at Texas Tech University.

Posted in Poetry

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