Poets Dancing II

They had sixteen pieces of luggage between them. The Botanist was Edith Oliver, who had helped her father revise his official handbook to the Kew Gardens Museum. The Zoologist was Maggie Browne, the Vocalist was Florence Hughes, daughter of the painter Arthur Hughes, the Bacteriologist was Margaret Chick, the Dilettante was Anne (a painter without a studio), and Charlotte was, as she had always been at the Gower Street School, the Humorist. In the days when they had walked from Hampstead to Bloomsbury and back, she had ‘carried on’ and made the way seem short. Now, as they started out, she seemed in excellent spirits. Although they had a bad crossing she danced a can-can for them in the cabin, in her boots and silk directoire knickers. And no-one could dance as well as Charlotte, when she felt like it.

Penelope Fitzgerald: Charlotte Mew & Her Friends (London, 1984)

A number of quiet good things in Laura Voghera Luzzatto’s new collection ‘Fumo e Profumo’ (Giuntina), beginning, at the beginning, with:

I lunari

Duecento gli anni e più
nascosti nel fondo d’un armadio,
racchiusi, legati da nastrini
nella scatola blu:
libriccini sottili raccolti e salvati
fra tempi infuriati.
Numeri allineati segnano giorni
e anni, contano
e raccontano
lune nuove
e notti di festa,
i sabati fioriti,
le gioie, i lutti
nel girotondo che ci trascina
tutti
dalla creazione del mondo.


I started doodling a translation, but found myself going in, literally, the opposite direction


Postscript

For L. V. L.

How many years how few,
strewn open on the bed,
ligatures ripped,
their onyx box upended,
its wrenched clasps:
the ledgers she knew safe
in quieter times her busy script
checking this and this.

‘Tonight another interlunar’
‘Today never saw the sun
for drifting smoke’
Days of work
their solid count of things done,
Sabbath’s ennui
noted also ‘iron roads
thinning towards horizon’.