Amelia Rosselli - Hospital Series

We are thankful tothe Vassar College Research Committee for its support. Some of these poems first appeared, often in a differentversion, in the following journals: Action Yes, Artful Dodge, Chelsea, CommonKnowledge, Kritya, Poetry Northwest, and The Spoon River PoetryReview. A handful also appeared in The Dragonfly: Selected Poems ofAmelia Rosselli, 19531981 (Chelsea Editions, 2009)special thanks toAlfredo de Palchi. Cover design by Erik Carter Interior design by Eileen Krywinski and Erik Rieselbach Manufactured in the United States of America First published as New Directions Poetry Pamphlet #19 in2015 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rosselli, Amelia, 19301996. [Poems. pages cm ISBN 978-0-8112-2397-3 ISBN 978-0-8112-2489-5 (e-book) I. pages cm ISBN 978-0-8112-2397-3 ISBN 978-0-8112-2489-5 (e-book) I.

Woodard, Deborah, translator. II. Antognini, Roberta,translator. III. Leporace, Giuseppe, translator. IV.

Rosselli, Amelia, 19301996.Hospital series. V. Rosselli, Amelia, 19301996. Hospital series Italian. VI.Title. PQ4878.O8A2 2015 851'.914dc23 2014038438 New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin by NewDirections Publishing Corporation, 80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011 .

By an experience impossible and dauntless we laboriously ruptured isolation, but the wagons that carried us like fruit to market were gloomy automobiles white if it snowed, infernal in the rain. Corrupting guard upon guard the mind settles upon a labored checkpoint for it deceived even itself: the party was an encounter of fashionable devils, each love fled when you unlatched the window of your poisoned power on the arm of my enchantment poor attempt at envy, but the spirit triumphed again with poor decisions made in the cellar. After suffering and hidden desperation Sunday was a reprieve and a desperation, the sea in motion muffled the spirits quarrels while gearshifts brought relief and the guilt was guilt acknowledged if desperation motions on toward bliss. seventy beggars and a shirt tearing itself in the naught, on a lark I stretched out in the naught and all was laurel and beneficence, beneficiated the king of the poor, slithering camel. A hard, light rain penetrated, in need of assistance I penetrated into rooms furnished for a truer life which in capital letters slipped away from mine, most obliging were those condemned to death. Invitations slithered across the rain-drenched hinges of a permeable city: no hidden beast powdered the goats marching enraptured toward the mounts of the Trinity: a camel, two Indians, and the people master of all the arts, music and mathematics, the furor of realizable dreams.

Lost in the pool of shadows white spider webs and powder for the eyelashes, grains of sand and small pearls under a most miserable rain wisely settled on a shuttered life. Two monkeys furrowed the soul with invisible tracks, the heart took it hard, old mustached sentinel, corrupt, drunk, tenacious, without hope yet expecting the whole curved sky on its sleeve. Does the heart have a sleeve? you ask and irony it, too, besleeved (cookie-riddled) draws or scratches a tremulous arabesque on the opaque hills of the brain: ironys a needle, storms bathe with opaque sadness the wanton blood, oh how breath runs to cut off the sentinels! (here lunacy you pulled off a kind of party, freed me.) Harsh the three-way sentence. On the outs with the archipelago we were swept away by the river, inorganic event, land and sea spat blood instead. As you left, I saw myself in the vast archipelago that was my mind so rigorous, logical, desperate from such a void: one battle, two, three battles lost. But the furor of our glances, you lantern that thought to guide, I broken winch, but the furor of these looks of ours foiled us: victory assured the battle won the bandits stronger than us, the union of two souls one tarantella.

The melancholy moon bent down tearful. Innocent rivulets, half-empty boats, large lakes in the mountains premise my being yours, and obedient. Your watercolors discomposed my mind loquacious from winterstice. Throughout springs discomfiture, I, storm-tossed ship, was still craftily scaling the bright carousels: drowned treasure yours and mine. The paintbrush quivered gently in the simplicity of a shack discomposed by winter that was an unremitting cruelty, a sleep of yours hidden from my prayers, a slipping away from railroad tracks often sliding toward my head instead, bowed when there was light. And the light discomposing into equal parts evolved economical colors of the trainmans map.

Pale, exhausted, wrathful you warded off swallows while I painted equally enamored of nature and my need. a sky-blue sun, a sprinkle of clotted crystal early morning, the lights still on, neighborhoods teeming with senility, the laundress with a basket but her shoulders tremble. Small doses of ingrained tranquility! red the indisposition, if your mind slumbers. Sex violent as an object (quarry of whitened marble) (curved amphora of clay) and artfully concealed in the form of an egg assailed the solitary one, as though hail were storming, in the living room. Not sybaritic nor sage serpentinely influenced by illustrious examples or illustrations of candor, it festered for peace and for the soul. Not sage nor sybaritic, but sage and mercantile rammed like the vessel against batlike rocks, it tumbled from the height of rigor and of the dance, from the sol fa mi do of another day: not sage and not sybaritic disguised as a soldier gasping and hazarding among the pigpens ransacking, in form and substance, sex had its way with him.

Hanging faces, bronzes on the wall, brazen faces, saints hanging on the wall of a solitary rented room, for four days I wait. A poor room, weighed down by plastic flowers, and lions at the door. A strumpet sea, and a hick town, outside green doors behind the new road, invisible mountains, the lights a diadem. Hills then green horses, their gallop an imbroglio, a stratagem for self-oblivion. Its still hot, and the sky is stained with unmarked graves.