Letter to Valerio Magrelli, Via Condotti, Roma

Letter to  Valerio Magrelli 

Via Condotti, Roma

I write to you while watching the film, Kaos, by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani. Finally after months, I was able to track it down and inexplicably in the dialogue, I was compelled to write to you, how your poems shed light—even in an alien tongue. 

Was it because the playwright visited his dead mama where the ghosts still have stories to tell through the fingers of pots? That made me think of your poems. You, a contemporary, or was it because I had been missing Mary Bianchi, my grandmother's best friend?

How in the afternoons she would grate cheese into a large jar, offer us  spongecake and sherry, or raviolis, while they gossiped. Her large hands could kill a rabbit or a chicken quicker than the eye could see, that same hand that patted my cheek each afternoon, coming home from school. 

She walked like a queen. The exact curl of her hands, my grandmother would demonstrate thus. Thous she had lived in America most of her life, Mary always thought of Italy as home. We drank her her wine and ate her chickens and ravioli, and became part of her clan, my family, my mother, aunts and uncles. 

The poets talk about exile, death is always an exile. All writing is a translation, this I know. In the movie Kaos, in the epilogue, Colloquio con la madre, the character Luigi (also the the author) confesses to conversing with his dead mother. He tells of the story of going to Malta one last time because something always eluded him, that yearning, that unnamed memory always goading poets onward into exile. 

Or was it because of the cable that Martin Mooij had sent us in February was delayed, it was his last Poetry International. Would we come? And will you be there, and may I hear the words again in their own native tongue?

April (11-18?)

He had written a poem about archaeology that I loved. I've a letter from him somewhere. He must've told me to see the film.

Valerio Magrelli

KEEPING THE DEAD IN THEIR PLACE

KEEPING THE DEAD IN THEIR PLACE


Have the dead taken Hollywood by storm?
In the Pink Section I read Night of the Living Dead
boosts Nielsen Ratings and Joyce's The Dead
is now playing at the Clay Theatre.
The city of Colma is bursting with landed celebrities:
Emperor Norton, Lefty O'Doul, Ishi, Wyatt Erp, John Doe.
The funeral parlor where we put Mary Bianchi to rest
is now the Petaluma Police station.
Have the cops taken to arresting the dead
for petty crimes against life?
Loitering in the park after curfew without a parade permit,
or driving without a vehicle while under the influence of death?
The police have trouble keeping them behind bars.
They have no fingerprints, no ID, no known address.
What of the half-dead, the brain-dead, the undead,
those dead as a door knob, or those sleeping like the dead?
The one in the White House was secretly dead
for years but he had a good make-up artist.
Soon, they will be wanting voting rights
and you know what that leads to.
Ma Bell foresees a unique eleventh-hour monopoly
on long-distance surcharges to the dead.
The IRS is interested in repossessing hell bank notes
but doesn't stand a ghost of a chance.
American Express and Club Med are working out
the details of an earlybird pre-payment plan
so those who beat the rap can have their R & R
on some island hideaway. DOA Anon has sprung up
across the country. All these perks—
too late for poor old Mary Bianchi
who was a gardener right to the very end.


5/4/89

1990 Green Fuse  or 1989?

This is what happened when I read the Sunday paper...

IN MARY BIANCHI'S GARDEN

That young man who
thinking he knew something of cycles
blamed poor old Mary Bianchi
for depleting the soil
instead of his own failure
to understand its needs.
She, who raised two generations
from that same soil
including members of my family
improved the soil each year
with chickenshit
to nourish the chard
which in turn was used
to feed the chickens
who laid strong eggs
like our bones.
She knew about cycles and patterns.
When her first husband died
of mushroom poisoning
she married his brother
and continued her work
in the garden.

IN MARY BIANCHI'S GARDEN, II

That young man who

thinking he knew something of cycles

blamed poor Mary Bianchi

for depleting the soil

instead of his own failure

to understand its needs.

She, who raised two generations

from that same soil

including our family

improved the soil each year

with manure

to nourish the chard

which in turn was used

to feed the chickens

who laid strong eggs

like our bones.

She knew about cycles and patterns.

When her first husband died

of mushroom poisoning

she married his brother

& carried on in the garden.

6/87   (possibly 6/23)? 

1993 We Are Not Swans, with Cecelia Woloch

1991 Poet Magazine, Fall issue

1990 Tight

1989 Sculpture Gardens Review

        Green Fuse

        Gulf Stream

I wrote my first draft during my CAC AIL residency at Napa State Hospital.

This typed draft is from Napa V Poetry conference, Aug. or Sept.

CHICKEN SOUP

draft

    —for Ruth Stone

1. With my hands full of the dilemma unborn chicks

ready, but too weak to escape their smooth white prisons,

I have trouble undoing the henhouse gate—

itís like convoluted love mounting in the afternoon hammock

where the intensity of sex was equal the heat of the argument

and blinding orgasms forestalled the inevitable equation

leaving me to count days and eggs with an exhausted passion.

Seeking solace in the henhouse,

Iím confronted with the argument head-on.

Details become significant: minute pinfeathers,

like venial sins, fringe the broody hen's eyelids.

She croons; the chicks gather up courage from under her wings

to answer the four hatchlings I attempt to rescue.

With the precision of a surgeon, I carefully tweeze

a piece of shell from the membrane of a half-born chick,

a bright ruby wells up over wet yellow feathers.

I remember how Binty stood on her colt's umbilical cord

to stop the bleeding. The belabored desire of my breasts and belly

swell and point accusingly at the parched earth, wanting

to masturbate with death in the chickencoop.

I mid-wife the second embryo: a miracle—

a neck, longer than what I think is possible

uncoils snakelike, from the opened shell.

With trembling haunches and sealed eyelids,

the chick blindly slides from the shell into my hand.

A pale necklace of pinfeathers ring the tiny winglets.

I move the chick closer to the brood;

its loud call doesn't rouse the maternal instinct of the hen;

she distractedly pecks at it, and tramples it

in her hasty mothering to protect the others.

Poultry yard facts are not news,

but cruelly catches me by surprise anyway.

2. In restaurants, heat lamps to keep the chicken warm

reminded me too much of Mary Bianchi's incubator:

a fortress of blue doors and windows.

Easter: I crawled through fields of yellow chicks

blooming furiously at the speed of light under 30-watt bulbs

to find just the right one. Under the miracle of chickens,

unnamed possibility opened up like infinity.

I was so angry when my grandmother simply said No,

and the dream quietly closed in on itself;

a small child covered in sawdust

fiercely clutching a downy chick to her breast.

From the poultry yard we learned uneasy truths—

suicidal stampedes in pens with lethal corners,

pecking order, what blood-smell was capable of rousing.

We taught the survivors how to drink,

clipped beaks and wings. We learned euphemisms,

practiced what we learned in the school yard.

I took a squeamish clinical interest

in deveining drumsticks during Sunday dinners.

When things got tough, I retreated to the sanctity of illness.

Feeding me chicken soup, Grandma always explained,

You've got to boil it until the bone-jelly comes out.

Was it really the bones of the chicken

that healed us when we were sick?

3. As I struggle to save the final chicks,

you say to me, I believe in letting nature take its course.

The dog loves the ones that don't hatch out.

So, I place the tiny ember back in its nest

The wind to catch this spark will not blow.

Long shadows crawl over yellow madrone leaves

toward the empty hammock supplicated by the evening breeze.

I fishtail down the valley; my rage and headlights flirt and neck

with the center line of the long highway toward home:

how many accidents are born in the aftermath of lover's quarrels?

This time we were lucky (or, unlucky, as it seems).

4. Your postcard arrives: Another chick hatched out;

it made me think of you. We shouldn't make a go of it.

I think of how cold bone-jelly quivered like a wild trout

in my grandmother's capable hands.

You didn't see how the chickís blood rusted

like a stigmata on my palms and thighs

during the hot summer heat.

1985?

rev. 8/13/ 87 rev. 2/ 93  still not there...
Humboldt County
& Napa
another version was published in Kamel Klaxon 1985
the first draft may have been written in 1984.