I return from the desert where I often fell;
put away the hemlock and serve me your wines:
with a moan of love, frighten off my assassins,
whose features are Longinus’s steadfast blindness! 

    Unnail my nails o new mother of mine!
Symphony of olive-trees, pour out your weeping!
And you will wait, sitting near my dead flesh,
for the threat to yield, for the lark to be gone!

    You pass … come back … your mourning braids my hair-cloth
with curare drops, ridges of humanity,
the rocky dignity that lies in your chastity,
and the Judith quicksilver of your inner honey.

    It’s eight in a charmer, cream-coloured morning.
It’s cold … A dog goes by gnawing the bone of another
dog that passed … And a match I extinguished
in capsules of silence begins to weep on my nerves!

    And in my heretic soul a dionysiac loathing of coffee
sings its sweet Asiatic festival.
 
 
 

Translated by Michael Smith and Valentino Gianuzzi