F R A N C O   A R M I N I O
__________________________________________________________

THREE SELECTIONS

 

Translated by Laura Modigliani

 

13 Poems

 

1

I am Arminio
Tall and fragile, of aluminum.

Poems are my low beams.
For this, I think,
I am not greatly enlightened.

2

To write is to smell
the rose that's not there.

3

It is always the body that suffers.
The soul endures a few hours
then dissipates
declaring itself.

4

We are made of wallpaper.
The pattern changes, naturally, and the wall
on which we rely.

5

Existence raises the
withering form.
From my name every day
a letter falls.

6

Before the day that gnaws away at our clothes
before everything mutates into mute damage
by the light of the moon and of the stars
between the whispering trees
bring me to the belly deep and pure kisses.

7

Death comes out from the hole
like the ant
To bring back to the darkness
the seed.

8

Back then I didn't have such burdens.
Women arrived at my heart
like a piazza full of pigeons.

9
VIEW FROM HERE

Peninsula pregnant with goods
of empty and dirty heads
peninsula concave like a cradle
attic of nothingness.
Seen from here
from the cesspool of celestial bodies
Afghanistan has become
the black hole, the mecca of disasters.

10
IN THE LAND OF CAIN AND ABRAHAM

America is the part and the whole, the figure and the backdrop.
We must get used to thinking of many entanglements, many plots,
religion and economy, order and chaos,
conformist and transgressor, calm and folly.
The new age goes to bed in this key
of war in peace and peace in war,
indifference and compassion, all is
mixed, lost, and found, we must understand it
we are in deep and we are not
nihilists, reactionaries, liberators. We cannot choose
the vendetta or the pardon,
we don't have to cut the tree to break the branch
in the land of Cain and Abraham.

11

The universe, in the end, is a gloomy thing.
Everyone dies, the sun and the fly.

12
Poem for Paolo Bresciani's Birthday
March 6, 2002

paolo I feel awful

and so do you: artists feel
awful

even if in general they are
happier
than others

artists are besieged by fake
artists

like dung flies

In a world that by now is all a
tabloid.

paolo I feel awful

and so do you: the world retreats
when there's an artist
nearby, the world wants
cons

cover ups, collusion.

paolo I feel awful

and so do you: the fault
is ours alone, we have put
in our veins

all the poison in the world
to filter

as if art could be a giant
kidney

a great purifier to empty the sewer

the communal grave of a corrupt society.

50 wishes from franco arminio.

13

The world has only one bone
that no one has ever seen.

 

 

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