With Simic and Marinetti at the Giubbe Rosse, by Charles Wright

Where Dino Campana once tried to sell his sad poems

Among the tables,

Where Montale settled into his silence and hid,

Disguised as himself for twenty years,

The ghosts of Papini and Prezzolini sit tight

With Carlo Emilio Gadda

somewhere behind our backs.

Let’s murder the moonlight, let’s go down

On all fours and mewl like the animals and make it mean what it

means.

Not even a stir.

Not even a breath across the plates of gnocchi and roast veal.

Like everything else in Florence, that’s part of the past,

The wind working away away kneading the sea so muscles . . .

Those who don’t remember the Futurists are condemned to repeat

them.

We order a grappa. We order a mineral water.

Little by little, the lucid, warm smile of the moon

Overflowed from the torn clouds.

Some ran.

A cry was heard in the solitude of the high plains.

Simic e Wright sulla traccia. La luna ammazzata.

From “Chickamauga” by Charles Wright. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $19; 96 pp.) 1995 Reprinted by permission.