I've learned more than I'd bargained for. About myself and people and relationships and how beautiful and tender and brittle and inevitable and unwritten it can be, all at once.
I've read Ovid's Metamorphoses. This ancient tale of change, of beginnings, of transitions, of love and lust and longing and not being able to tell the difference -- truly, he's changed the way I think about and approach literature and life. Well, really, Io and Arachne and Phaeton and Daedalus have changed me. That little book of mythology has become one of my absolute favorites.
And I've started (really) learning Italian. Do you know what it's like to have someone tenderly whisper buonanotte bellissima to you every night? Let's just say ya learn quick. The language, to me, is more than syllables and intonations. It's an art form. It links the You to the Other. And it's haunting in its melodic beauty.
Thus, I give you my first piece of poetry! So, this is a (very, very loose) translation of two of Antonello Borra's "Autoscatti," which means self-portrait photographs, from a collection of thirteen. He explores many different subjects--perhaps versions of the self--but these two are about Cupid and Psyche.
Now, I must tell you, Ovid did not write about Cupid and Psyche, Love and the Soul, but gosh I adore this myth. Can you imagine? What would a love affair between these two look like? How would they ever understand one another? In my rendition, they use different dictions. For how could it be any other way?
Soul
Even my shoes reek of you.
That Cole Haan boot box, slick black
like your Ducatti on the Coastal Highway,
whispers white script across its lid.
But its right-angled regularity took a vow
years ago, became a bulging recluse, gorged
on your letters, carefully collected, consumed,
immuring under my twin bed.
My glassy blue-greens sip their fill
of your cursive, a dialect
I once knew—
Each hastily-scribbled missive a chapter
from your tale. But whose novel
are you writing? Mia
bella principessa,
your quill sliced into the parchment,
painted grey by familiar greased fingers,
folded your song into darkness, mailed to me
Or the butterfly you imagine to be soaring
on your love-language. Into this silence I breathe
screams darting between the tapestry threads,
as you shamefully weave yourself the
hero.
*
Love
Ulysses, Jason, and the rest—
the men who moisten your neck
with plaited promises, as Apollo
wakens the dawn when they’ll be gone.
In meter, rhyme, and verse have I
whispered to you dozens of times,
upon arrows dipped in air-mail ink
aimed firm, resolved – my love, don’t blink.
Please, cease this nonsense, cottontail!
With forever-stamps how could we fail
to share a life, a future, too?
For with each word I fly to you.
Machu Picchu, Holy See,
these places you have gone with me
though not in body, indeed in mind
your heart has
lingered here with mine.
Why seek more, why blindly rush?
Though I fault you not for doing such.
Verses for you, my muse, shall always flow,
and only cease if forced for so.
Poetry, for me, is always a work in progress, but I've been thinking very much about this pair lately so I thought I would share my most recent draft. Seriously, please email me with any and all suggestions - let's workshop together :)
L
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