by Primo Levi
Throbbing tense outside its shell it tastes
The shy delights of double love.
December 7, 1983
A Profession
All you have to do is wait, your ballpoint poised:
The lines will buzz around you, like drunk moths;
One comes near the flame, you grab it.
No, it’s not over, one is not enough,
But it’s a lot already, the work’s started.
The others compete to land nearby,
Lined up or in a circle, ordered or disordered,
Simple and silent, obedient to your command:
You’re the boss, without a doubt.
If it’s a good day, you order them in droves.
Fine work, no? It’s time-honored,
Sixty centuries old and ever new,
With strict rules or relaxed ones,
Or no rules, as you like.
You sense you’re in good company,
Not lazy, not lost, not always useless,
Sandaled and togaed,
Cloaked in linen, crowned with laurel.
Just be careful that you don’t presume.
January 2, 1984
Flight1
Rock and sand and no water
Sand stitched with his footsteps
Numberless all the way to the horizon:
He was fleeing, though no one was chasing.
Crushed and scattered rubble
Stone eroded by wind
Split by frost after frost,
Dry wind and no water.
No water for him
Who needed only water,
Water to erase
Water savage dream
Impossible water to make him pure again.
Leaden rayless sun
Sky and dunes and no water
Ironic water made by mirages
Precious water poured off in sweat
And up above the untapped water of the clouds.
He found the well and went down,
He plunged his hands in and the water went red.
No one could ever drink it again.
January 12, 1984
1. Cf. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, l. 332: “Rock and no water and the sandy road.”
The Survivor1
To B.V.
Since then, at an uncertain hour,
That agony returns:
And till his ghastly tale is told,
His heart within him burns.
He sees his comrades’ faces
livid at first light,
gray with cement dust,
Vague in the mist,
Dyed by death in their restless sleep:
At night they grind their jaws
Under the heavy burden of their dreams
Chewing a nonexistent turnip.
“Back, away from here, drowned people,
Go. I haven’t stolen anyone’s place,
I haven’t usurped the bread of anyone,
No one died for me. No one.
Go back to your haze.
It’s not my fault if I live and breathe
And eat and drink and sleep and put on clothes.”
February 4, 1984
1. Cf. S. T. Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, l. 582, and Inferno XXXIII:141. B.V. is Bruno Vasari, “Levi’s unidentified antagonist in The Drowned and the Saved and the chairman of the Turin branch of the National Association of Ex-Deportees” (Thomson, 506). Vasari’s memoir of survival in Mauthausen, Bivouac of Death, had been published in Italy in 1945. Vasari believed that “ex-deportees had survived the Nazi camps not by cunning or brutality but by force of their virtue.”
The Elephant1
Dig: you’ll find my absurd
Bones in this snowy place.
I was tired of the burden and the road
And missed the warmth and grass.
You’ll find Punic coins and arms
Buried by avalanches: absurd, absurd!
My history and History are absurd:
What did Carthage and Rome matter to me?
Now my lovely ivory, our pride,
Noble, curved like the moon,
Lies in shards with the pebbles in the stream:
It wasn’t made for piercing breastplates
But for digging roots and pleasing women.
We fight only for females,
And intelligently, without spilling blood.
You want my story? It’s briefly told.
A shrewd Indian nursed and tamed me,
An Egyptian shackled me and sold me,
A Phoenician dressed me in armor
And set a tower on my rump.
It was absurd that I, a tower of flesh,
Invulnerable, gentle, terrifying,
Caught in these unfriendly mountains,
Should slip on ice of yours I’d never seen.
For us, when we fall, there’s no salvation.
A daring blind man tried for a long time
To find my heart with his lance point.
At these peaks livid in the sunset
I hurled my useless
Dying trumpet blast: “Absurd, absurd.”
March 23, 1984
1. The “daring blind man” is Hannibal, who is said to have contracted an eye disease while crossing the Alps.
Sidereus Nuncius
I’ve seen two-horned Venus
Navigating suavely in the sky.
I’ve seen valleys and mountains on the Moon
And three-bodied Saturn,
I, Galileo, first among humans;
Four stars orbiting Jupiter,
And the Milky Way disintegrating
Into infinite legions of new worlds.
I’ve seen, though I did not believe, ominous spots
Infecting the face of the Sun.
I built this telescope myself,
A learned man but with wise hands:
I polished its mirrors, I aimed it at the Sky
The way you’d aim a bombard.
I was the one who broke Heaven open
Before the Sun burned my eyes.
Before the Sun burned my eyes
I had to bend and say
I didn’t see what I saw.
He who chained me to the earth
Didn’t loose earthquakes or lightning,
He had a low, flat voice,
He had a face like everyman.
The vulture that gnaws at me every evening
Has the face of everyman.
April 11, 1984
Give Us
Give us something to destroy,
A crown, a quiet place,
A trusted friend, a magistrate,
A phone booth,
A journalist, a renegade,
A fan of the opposing team,
A lamppost, a manhole cover, a bench.
Give us something to deface,
A plaster wall, the Mona Lisa,
A mudguard, a gravestone,
Give us something to defile,
A timid girl,
A flower bed, ourselves.
Don’t despise us, we are heralds and prophets.
Give us something that burns, offends, cuts, breaks, befouls,
That makes us feel we exist.
Give us a club or a Nagant,
Give us a syringe or a Suzuki.
Pity us.
April 30, 1984
Chess I
Only my age-old enemy
The abominable black queen
Has had nerve like mine
Protecting her hapless king.
Mine is hapless and tired too, of course:
He cowered first
Behind his line of fine pawns,
Then fled across the chessboard
Off-kilter, ridiculous, in little faltering moves:
Battles are not for kings.
But I!
If I had not been there!
Castles and knights are fine, but I!
&
nbsp; Potent and prepared, direct, diagonal,
Far-reaching like a catapult,
I sailed through their defenses;
They had to bow their heads,
The fraudulent and haughty blacks.
Victory intoxicates like wine.
Now it’s all over.
The skill and hate are spent.
A great hand has swept us away,
Weak and strong, wise, foolish, careful,
White and black thrown together, lifeless.
With a clatter of pebbles it tossed us
Into the dark wood box
And shut the top.
When will we play again?
May 9, 1984
Pious1
Pious bull my ass. Pious under duress,
Pious against my will, pious against nature,
Pious in Arcadia, pious by euphemism.
It takes a lot of nerve to call me pious
And even dedicate a sonnet to me.
You are pious, professor,
Learned in Greek and Latin, Nobel Laureate,
Who beats on the shut gates with flowering branches
Faute de mieux
While I bend to the yoke, imagine how gladly.
Had you been present when they made me pious
Your desire to write poems
And eat boiled meat for lunch would have left you.
Oh think that I don’t see, here in the meadow,
My brother whole, erect, enraged,
Who with a single shudder of his flanks
Inseminates my sister cow?
Oy gevalt! Unheard-of violence,
The violence of making me nonviolent.
May 18, 1984
1. An allusion to well-known lines by Carducci, “T’amo, pio bove” (I love you, pious bull).Gewalt means “violence” in German; in Yiddish the term is used principally as an interjection, to express extreme and desperate protest.
Chess II
. . . So, in the middle of the game,
When it’s almost over,
You’d like to change the rules?
You know very well it isn’t done.
Castling out of check?
Or even, if I’ve understood you right,
Changing the moves you made at the beginning?
No, you agreed to these rules
When you sat down at the board.
Once you’ve touched a piece you’ve made your move:
This game of ours is serious.
No bargaining, obfuscation, trickery.
Make your move, your time is almost up;
Don’t you hear the clock tick?
Why keep playing, anyway?
To anticipate my moves
You need a different savvy than you have.
You knew from the beginning
I am better.
June 23, 1984
To the Muse
Disheveled muse, lazy muse,
Horned horny muse,
Muse of a hundred horns,
Muse without head or tail,
Muse out of fashion,
Why do you visit me so rarely?
You see how I’ve been shrunk,
Drunk, sunk, cuckolded,
Yes I’ve thunk, but it’s all bunk;
And down here,
Down where my ideas germinate,
I feel a bump that wasn’t there before,
Inflamed and sore.
It’s not likely it holds poetry,
But other bullshit and soft stuff.
If you don’t get down to work,
Next time you’ll find
Your poet crazy, dead, or fucked.
September 5, 1982
Casa Galvani1
My master likes frogs:
Every night he sends me down to the Reno,
But he doesn’t give them to Gegia to fry.
Instead of taking care of his sick patients
He hangs frogs on the railing of his balcony,
He skins them, then torments them with a nail,
Spends the day watching them dance,
And writes letters in Latin:
Who knows what he hopes to get from it!
So every night I have to go around
With lantern, sieve, and basket.
I have to say: it’s not new work.
That other one, the one from Scandiano,
Yes, him, the abbot Spallanzani2:
He sent me out to get frogs, too,
But instead of hanging them on the railing
He put the males and females together,
But made the males wear little pants
So they couldn’t fuck anymore:
And he claims to be a Christian!
Masters are almost all insane.
May 3, 1984
1. Luigi Galvani (1737–1798) studied bioelectricity, conducting experiments with frogs.
2. The biologist Lazzaro Spallanzani (1729–1799) investigated their mating habits.
The Decathlete
Believe me, the marathon is nothing,
Or the hammer or weights: no one event
Compares with how we work.
Yes, I won: I’m better known than yesterday,
But I’m much older and worn out.
I flew the four hundred like a sparrow hawk,
With no pity for the man behind me.
Who was he? A nobody, a novice,
Someone I’d never seen before,
A third-world loser,
But whoever’s running beside you is always a monster.
I broke his back, the way I wanted to.
Reveling in his agony, I didn’t feel my own.
The pole vault wasn’t so easy,
But luckily the judges
Didn’t see me cheat
And made the five meters good for me.
And the javelin is my secret joy;
You don’t have to toss it into the sky.
The sky is empty: why would you want to pierce it?
It’s enough to imagine at the end of the meadow
The man or woman whom you wish were dead,
And the javelin becomes a spear,
It will smell blood, and fly farther.
I don’t know what to tell you about the fifteen hundred;
I ran it feeling nausea
And cramps, stubborn and desperate,
Terrified
By the convulsive drumbeat of my heart.
I won, but the price was high:
Afterward, the discus was heavy as lead
And slipped from my hand, slimy
With my broken veteran’s sweat.
You booed me from the bleachers,
I heard you loud and clear.
But what do you want from us?
What could you still ask?
To levitate in the air?
To write a poem in Sanskrit?
To calculate pi to the final digit?
To console the afflicted?
To act out of compassion?
September 4, 1984
Dust
How much dust
Lies on the nervous tissue of a life?
Dust has no weight or sound,
No color or intention: it obscures, denies,
Obliterates, hides, paralyzes;
It doesn’t kill, it smothers.
It isn’t dead. It sleeps.
It harbors spores millennia old
Pregnant with future damage,
Tiny chrysalises waiting
To break up, decompose, degrade:
Pure mixed-up indefinite ambush
Ready for the assault to come,
Powerlessness that will be power
At the sounding of a silent signal.
But it also harbors different germs,
Dormant seeds that will become ideas,
Each one instinct with a universe
Unforeseen, new, beautiful, and strange.
Therefore respect and fear
&nb
sp; This gray and shapeless mantle:
It holds evil, good,
Danger, and many written things.
September 29, 1984
Date Book
On a night like this
Of north wind and rainfall mixed with snow,
Someone dozes by the television
While someone else decides to rob a bank.
On a night like this, as far away
As light can travel in five days
Is a comet that falls in front of us
Out of the dark womb without high or low.
It’s the same one Giotto painted;
It won’t bring good luck or ill,
But ancient ice and perhaps an answer.
On a night like this
There’s a half-mad old man
Who in his day was a fine machinist,
But his day was not our day
And now he sleeps at Porta Nuova and drinks.
On a night like this
There’s a man who lies beside a woman
And feels that he no longer weighs a thing,
That his tomorrows no longer weigh a thing,
That it’s today that counts but not tomorrow
And that the flow of time is ending.
On a night like this the witches
Chose hemlock and hellebore
To gather by the brightness of the moon
And cook in their kitchens.
On a night like this
There’s a transvestite in Corso Matteotti
Who’d give a lung or kidney
To scoop himself out and become a woman.
On a night like this
Seven young men in white coats
Four of them smoking pipes
Are designing a long, long tunnel
Down which they’ll send a mass of protons
Almost as fast as the speed of light:
If they succeed, the world will explode.
On a night like this a poet
Stretches his bow and searches for a word
That will contain the power of the typhoon
And the secrets of blood and seed.
November 14, 1984
Still to Do
I wouldn’t disturb the universe.
I’d like, if possible,
To get free silently,
Light-footed, like a smuggler,
The way one slips away from a party.
To halt the stubborn pumping of my lungs