To Anna Maria Ortese

^{translated from the Italian by Peter Covino}

Spring returns, and with it youth returns;
a taste for life returns that winter rendered
tasteless and full of gloom and pity for the living
who reemerge from the cheerless abyss of January
ice or rainy March. Now that we can
it’s natural to conjure up old times, haughty
and brash, from a youthfulness lost among
insults and sighs. Unbolt the doors to adventure
after months of fever and punishment, in the space
of bitter and desolate memory. But returned
again to this infernal-hovel and handmaiden
of sin, in order not to transgress bold
wavering sinner, I’ve opened the windows
to the wind, to fickle April trying
to savor vital new lifeblood
that would enable me to shut age-old feelings
of death and dreaded fear into a drawer
of memories until I can go to bed leaving
every thought to sleep, without sustenance
for an empty future, free at last from words.