“And what will these boys do when we close our eyes for good and they’ll have to fetch for themselves?” My mother used to say it to no one in particular, at home, in the shop, wherever she stepped. Not to me, who am still here, and have seen lots of wars and disasters, sickness, […]

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Do the names of English towns deliver what they seem to mean? A century of economics is summarised in Milton Keynes. And Leighton Buzzard, not far off, is somehow waiting to be fed. One sees a sky fill up with shadows waiting for the freshly dead. Geoff Page

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The curvatures, the curvatures … back home we drive 300 Ks, our small car clinging to the tar, upside down to that new day arriving for our friends up north, entering to their different June. The Eurail map’s in love with Europe but gravity’s a single tune. Geoff Page

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Diu al ghe. S’al gh’e la figa al ghé. (There is a God. If there’s the cunt there is God.) —Cesare Zavattini Against a pile of logs, at La Frediana, you would say, touch me, this body must also die— your legs open, and between them I could see a sort of pink and black […]

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Horse-floats here in Sweden prompt an overdue analysis. You trail behind them slowly, wondering how it could have come to this. Once, between the shafts, they dragged us cheerily with no great fuss. Now, it seems, we’re towing them when they should still be towing us. Geoff Page

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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Now that it’s evening and the cicadas have stopped, now that the fly has been replaced by the mosquito and there is a slight coolness that makes the air mild, even now it is still your voice that touches me inside.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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