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Fabio Pusterla 
Simon Knight, Translator
Translated from the Italian by Simon Knight
1.
Where leads this road that no one now takes,
barely discernible, weed-grown
pathway?
Here people rolled on their bellies, with coarse mocking laughs,
and there was much shouting, suffused with pain.
(It is, it is possible, even without us,
to walk this way.
One must flatten oneself in the grass, forget something,
and as for you, cursed fear,
your power we shall have to break).
2.
for Matteo
There was a kind of shyness to confess
our familiarity with the tangled ivy,
the thickets of spiny acacia, and those pathways
long sought, found and lost again
in our ignorance of the underwood.
Action, not words, you thought,
introducing me to an imaginary city
you were building in a sunless land:
in silence, and because words were numbered,
better not waste them.
8.
Strong smells, of mint or verbena,
you seem to find off-putting. But pebbles, radishes,
objects abandoned in the garden
tempt you to dig and explore: water dripping
from pipes, broken hoes,
cobwebs, the darkness under the stairs. A coin
resurrected from the vegetable patch, five-cent
bewhiskered king, you put to your mouth.
Lost in the early nineteen hundreds:
maybe someone was digging potatoes (it was wartime);
and here on the land of the dead
spring forth the runner beans.
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