In this Ancient Game
facing the wall. Eyes pressed.
All the way to this empty clearing
—brisk air after a storm.
There you stand, your feet like stones.
No place hides the vanished.
*
in this ancient game
whoever wins does not come back
cannot be found.
*
no one’s home base—
keep watching over it,
with closed eyes count
within the eternal One.
*
threshold dwellers, tightrope walkers
master felines—may they gift you
the art of disappearing.
***
For a Stone Sky
between the branches of the lungs
crows have alighted.
No beat calls them away.
*
from this concrete vase
we stick out our heads like flowers
cut off at birth.
—The light is almost gone.
*
they shot at the sky,
it became stone.
We, etched on a grave
—red and blue figures
traveling with open wings.
Among these ruins
someone’s finger
will touch our story
and birds escaped from the ambush,
we will again fly through the air.
***
Pixel Dust
in warehouses where the air is memory
an algorithm of our identities
*
this cage of mirrors
—a reflection
with someone else’s eyes.
Pixel dust, what we are.
*
where the lips were
we will not find the coin
for the other shore.
*
with the life that has always been life
someone, one day
will raise the screen.
*
like poisoned blood
the bit stream will stop.
***
broken for no fire or
construction. —On the shore of eternity
to crumble like rotten wood.
We are leftovers of a meal
branches bleached redeemed
by the sea, returned to winter.
***
A Single Score
(Johann Sebastian Bach, Choral Prelude in F Minor, “Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ,” BWV 639)
a single score
of black and white moments
moves our every step
on the pedal of the earth.
*
with this sound box
and bone bows
we are instruments of the air
at dawn, at sunset
a faded mother’s hands
conduct us.
—
Franca Mancinelli was born in Fano, Italy, in 1981. She is widely considered to be one of the most important poetic voices to emerge in Italy in the past fifteen years. Her first two collections of verse poetry, Mala kruna (2007) and Pasta madre (2013), were awarded several prizes in Italy and later republished together, in John Taylor’s translation, as At an Hour’s Sleep from Here (The Bitter Oleander Press, 2019). Also available from The Bitter Oleander Press are her prose poems: The Little Book of Passage (2018). These two translations have been followed by The Butterfly Cemetery: Selected Prose 2008-2021, a bilingual volume just released by the same American publisher. Mancinelli’s new collection of poems, Tutti gli occhi che ho aperto (All the Eyes that I Have Opened), was awarded the Europa in Versi Prize in 2021.
John Taylor is an American writer, critic, and translator who lives in France. Among his many translations of modern Greek, French, and Italian literature are books by Philippe Jaccottet, Jacques Dupin, Pierre Chappuis, Pierre-Albert Jourdan, José-Flore Tappy, Pierre Voélin, Georges Perros, Elias Papadimitrakopoulos, Lorenzo Calogero, and Alfredo de Palchi. His translations have been awarded grants and prizes from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Academy of American Poets, Pro Helvetia, and the Sonia Raiziss Charitable Foundation. He is the author of several volumes of short prose and poetry, most recently The Dark Brightness (Xenos Books, 2017), Grassy Stairways (The MadHat Press, 2017), Remembrance of Water & Twenty-Five Trees (The Bitter Oleander Press, 2018), and a “double book” co-authored with Pierre Chappuis, A Notebook of Clouds & A Notebook of Ridges (The Fortnightly Review Press, 2018).