Seven Poems

Naked words on the tree trunk, I sitabove them naked, pure the intention, the exegesisdoesn't call for other exegetes. Enough thatit issues from your call, life doesn't expose itselfin corollaries without cause.

You have flames in your mouth and are the moonitself, you have an eye in your mouth to purifythis broken sob, which calls you, by theletters of your name.

Translator's Note: Small textual errors characterize Rosselli's poetry. Sometimes unconscious, sometimes deliberate, they may be compared to wounds or scars that Rosselli cannot eradicate from her text, while, at the same time, they give evidence of her trilingual status. In an early essay on Rosselli, Pier Paolo Pasolini referred to this signature glitch as "lapsus."

I've put your name inside a heartthat wraps itself around a trunk, theskin does its best to cling to you, and themountain doesn't cross you.

The impure gesture seems to touch on rashest aims;your name remains coupled with nothingnessI offer you inscribed in the tough bark, andyou keep your vow.

Inexplicable or exemplarygenerous and trite you let yourself indulgea few old habits.

The tongue quivers in its mouth, a wing-beatthat is language.

Then he felt the need to raise, pyramids to thetruth (or to his setting it in motion).

The goatish sole-bending skyalmost vigorously promised: ignoranceand terra-cotta.

Believing briefly, in seeing each other again, in issuingpentatonic disappointment the laughter is alwaysbitter; soon you'll see again the rebirth of lustrousplantations and the harvest, a temporaryblindfolding of fate.

    Press your disengagement in the nightoversee your plans, amour je t'ai tué: nightagain the candies a blackboard Islip through your misogynous fingers. Soonyou'll see again the chanting of fate, you rabbitand I together in the evenings of deathreduced to an industrial love.

Dialogue with the Poets

From poet to poet: in sterile language, thatappropriates the benediction for itself and makes of it a littlegame or gesture, slowing the pace over the riverto let every truth be told. From poet as poet:like rapacious birds, preying on the windthat carries them and doing what they can to promotehunger. Step by step: a futile theme thatboosts their spirits, seeing their reputations grow, the literatiwith shirts open for a tan, under the sunof all tranquillities: one lapseushers them to the hereafter with death appearingto descend and clasp them tight.

Ironically bogus, or is there a grain of truth? that Ican call yours also?

But in the stream of possibilities there sprang upa little nocturnal star as well: my vanity, to beamong the vanguard a colossus of passion: a Christ emblemof the renunciations. Announcing chastity, dilemmasresolvable and not, knowing how to parry the emblemfrom the virile mouths, I discovered you'd shot yourselfwith a single bullet to the back of the head: self-dominion ifthe hurricane roars in the night. Hurricane particleof such a vast dominion it furrows even your browof nonexistential shames.

And at the stroke I saw you again, dead on the floor, displayingidiocies, you tack your shirt to all four cornersspitting conformist kicks on the ground.

a sky-blue sun, a flood of clotted crystalbright and early, the lights still on, neighborhoods teeming

with senility, the laundress with a basket but her shoulderstremble. Small doses of engrained tranquillity! enflamed the

indisposition, if your mind drifts.

You hadn't died; you lived merelyto moisten my lips with supplicantalms, to lay out deceitful fatesin the Bergsonian manner upon my life crystallinepermissiveness, while you ate horse'scabbage. You weren't alive; you were merelydead, after so many ill-timed battlesin the soporific spirit.

I wasn't sleeping; I merely searched forclamorous unions between lost soulsthat upon...