Fabio Pusterla
trans. by Will Schutt
THREE POEMS
Up and Down the Step 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.
Witness
Convincing him was hard; in the end, laziness and that clot of shame and fear won out. There’s nothing to worry about, we said, just tell her what you’ve always told us. Omit the names, fumble the telling. At least it won’t have been pointless, it won’t get forgotten. And we reminded him of what seemed to us the most important details: the ice, the frostbite, the maggot soup in Metz, the escape in an officer’s uniform, the SS on the trolley from Como to Cernobbio, the smuggler in the woods along the border. Or some of what got said, like “Shoot me, go on, shoot me” and “I spit in your face, I spit on you” (though that was much earlier, involved a factory, a secret war). For our part, we wanted to know who had pulled the strings and why and who had sat in the best seats, facing the orchestra. And most off all that he understood it, that he saw the salamanders had made it through the fire. The wormery.
At first, there was a problem with the microphone; next, the sound test. Embarrassment. The journalist was kind, she understood. Relax, she kept saying, there’s no rush. When you’re ready. But, having finally made up his mind, looking at her for what may have been the first time, recovering his voice from a dusty, deep recess, he spoke slowly. Go away. Go away, please, this minute.
That, I think, was the last he spoke of it.
Flower, Cliff
It must have been a morning, just one: something
like an unexpected, radiant light
behind or below the clouds, a stretch of pink
fixed before your (maybe hard, somber) day ahead.
The audacity of looking. That’s what was revealed to you.
And after: to be true to or betray that potential light.
Little more than that.
Reckon up, breathe, or look
away from what hurts, summons and scrutinizes you.
Your pinch of fireflies, your pinch of ashes.
Weigh them. Flower and cliff.
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.