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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Of all the kings of Portugal we’ve seen the last but one today— well, not quite him but all his rooms, his bathtub and his queen’s bidet. Inside this castle in three styles, each one foretelling Disneyland, his bust preserves a fine moustache— but no one jumps to its command. Geoff Page

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They are full of incomplete dreams hedges which have grown too high fallen fences gone to seed dandelion garden tennis courts a mineral not vegetable mangle rusting in peace, its gutta percha roller white hard as the sheets it pressed— somewhere beyond the wild-haired china pears there is the cap of the well backed up […]

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At festivals, of course, you hear it, this clapping for an absentee— the young director in L.A. already on a higher fee. In aviation, it’s less common. A pilot’s way with physics’ laws in France will earn from passengers a grateful round of stunned applause. Geoff Page

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Once there was a vineyard here in green and ordered rows. Now the bleaching grasses bend and nothing fruitful grows except a self-sown lemon tree with leprous, aching boughs, heavy with the bitter fruit come of a daze of flowers. Strange, ugly and unpromising fruit, a crop of warted noses, nothing you present to view […]

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