Blossoms are out on the trees, on the trees at the Medway Maritime Hospital With their elegant shapes and their heady perfumes, they colour the morning air. Springtime has come to the alleys and lanes criss-crossed at the back of the hospital, Flowering cherry and crab apple sleeving the branches so lately bare. Doctors from […]

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Now that it’s evening and the cicadas have stopped, now that the fly has been replaced by the mosquito and there is a slight coolness that makes the air mild, even now it is still your voice that touches me inside. Like an expert hand that knows where and how to touch. Paolo Bertolani translated […]

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Flashing by the railway gardens, each family with its little plot, one thinks about them ten flights up and how a cactus in a pot is not enough for those who’ve left the smells of an ancestral farm. Nostalgia likes to put down roots— and memory sings its little psalm. Geoff Page

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The blood in my veins is the blood of kings. If we all had our rights I’d be Duke of Earl With a cut-glass voice and a bat of wings So why did I marry a working girl? If we all had our rights I’d be Duke of Earl. I’d live on a yacht with […]

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It was pleasant to return home at night after a dance or a dinner your head swimming and the eyes on the streetlamps swaddled by midges thick in the mist and the lights of the houses all turned off and the silence then. Paolo Bertolani translated by Massimo Bacigalupo and Jennifer Compton

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Two years later … no, not quite … everything’s still going well— our friends in Stockholm. still together, find that age can’t break the spell. With magnifying glass at breakfast he starts her sweet, embarrassed smile by reading us a love lyric he’s written in the “modern style”. Geoff Page

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Quine is the American philosopher Willard Van Quine. It is all explained on the internet. I want a sloop. A flush-decked, ten-gun sloop, One mast, rigged fore-and-aft, is what I most Desire. But slooplessness is now my brother. I am notorious along the coast. In Montserrat they talk of nothing other (In Maracaibo too, and […]

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It is now winter wherever I look but it’s fine up here, we are in my mother’s small field and it’s dusk. For hours the springtime that you are has been moving around me —all that one can say of a love. You speak to me from the tree you have climbed to gather for […]

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Surfacing again each Sunday, whether breakfast’s rice or cheese, their parents speak a mother tongue but children use teenagerese, a simple grammar made of grunts, a vocab that contrives to never say exactly what it means except perhaps “as if”, “whatever”. Geoff Page

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Minòn good cat who did not return. When I walk through Montemarcello I see many good-looking cats, but none has your snout and your marmot ways. The roofs that touch the window from which you came in are empty— Minòn good cat, who went off to die, as all cats do, far from home. Paolo […]

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