Word count: 196
Paragraphs: 5
for Neeli
Not exactly private, your personal library
maps an attitude to the ‘world,’ even if the word’s
increasingly difficult these days. Almost difficult
as ‘beauty,’ if that kind of failure remains possible.
Most conspiracies of some toying with their devices,
preferring not to handle a book, flip pages, to read
or to be read by letters and sounds that overwhelm us.
The path through the forest discovers a dizzying place,
a clearing reached after many years among words
that some mornings are unfamiliar as one’s middle name.
A library where public and personal correspond,
when thoughts and a desire to scribble more or less
coincide. The clearing’s gone, the book’s back on the shelf,
and another book there on the armchair overnight.
Or the jovial reply of our 96-year-old neighbor just encountered at the mailboxes:
“I’m doing well, I think.” Defining with her gallant smile, a time when understanding seems a luxury reserved for the very rich or the very intolerant.
Waking below the glowing shutter
birdsong suspended in the glare.
To shuffle the hallway’s length
in dazzled hush, spoon out coffee
recalling a favorite title on the shelves,
now lost, like much else, to sleep.
Paul Vangelisti has published more than thirty books of poetry and is a noted translator from Italian. He lives in Pasadena and Bagnone (Italy). In 2006, Lucia Re’s and Vangelisti's translation of Amelia Rosselli’s War Variations won both the Premio Flaiano in Italy and the PEN-USA Award for Translation; while his translation of Adriano Spatola’s The Position of Things: Collected Poems, 1961-1992 received the Academy of American Poets translation prize in 2010. In 2015 he edited Amiri Baraka’s S.O.S.: Poems 1961-2013, for Grove Atlantic, and in 2019 Edizioni Galleria Mazzoli in Modena (Italy) published a bilingual edition of Vangelisti's poems, Imperfect Music.