Fabio Pusterla

TRANS. BY WILL SCHUTT

Up and Down the Steps of Albogasio

Houses on cliffs, minor asperities,
a child in mind; and, crosswise, the breva
taking the lake at a slant, a shapeshifter,
sweeping down from Saint Martin’s Pass,
hugging the rocks and roads, then gusting
past Gandria, where the water widens.
It is an evening of strong winds when I
descend the village stairs, as if in a chorus,
my hand gripping a stretcher that swings
and grazes the walls and at every turn
scrapes away white dust, a final
coat of lime for Erminia, the kind lady
who died somewhere else and is now
returning to her balcony of tiny flowers.
We pass into the dark, testing each
step down as we negotiate the steep
flight and narrow porticoes. The lake below
drops from sight but we can hear it
darkly lapping at the docks, and the tarred
wooden hearts of boats groaning.
Doors open, faces appear.
They don’t say a word as they watch
our strange procession lumber down to the black
houses of sleep. Yet something rises
from the bottom, a thick, moist draft,
a handful or swelling of air
settles in and demands a hearing,
unlikely life rising off the water, still formless
yet already present, already lording
its disembodied existence over us
on our way down, and keeps climbing,
like faint smoke. Ancient steps,
the steps of Albogasio, where the living and the dead
flutter past one another, mumbling their hellos.

Fabio Pusterla was born in Mendrisio, Switzerland, in 1957. He is the award-winning author of eight collections of poetry. His most recent, Cenere, o Terra (Ashes, or Earth), was published by Marcos y Marcos in 2018. An active translator and essayist, he lives and works between Lombardy and Lugano, where he teaches Italian language and literature.

Will Schutt is the author of Westerly (Yale, 2013) and translator, most recently, of My Life, I Lapped It Up: Selected Poems of Edoardo Sanguineti (Oberlin, 2018). His translation of Fabio Pusterla’s selected poems, Brief Homage to Pluto and Other Poems, is forthcoming from Princeton University Press.