Song of a Reformed Headhunter

We heard tonight we got the apartment. I wrote this rough draft to mark the occasion. Changing Countryside "Yes, this will be our house, today I’m here to see it..." —Alda Merini, “Roman Wedding,” trans. Susan Stewart The ceiling is too high for the apartment to make a cage, the living room too wide to touch the heaving tips of feathered span, the light too good not to be natural light. But this high door locks out the open world and locks security in. In closets, wings will soon be folded, wrapped, and put away. The window above the bed is made of steel. I turn a faucet and, in the falling light, a river runs to where it drains. I turn, a beech opens its palm to act a desk. And you, who by the light of metaphor are the birdcatcher, are a bird, by me, singing about the changing countryside.

Love Lessons is a selection of poems by contemporary Italian poet Alda Merini, translated by Susan Stewart. Merini's treatment of love is both intensely erotic and metaphysical. In fact, it does not distinguish between the body and the mind. There is no ironic posturing here, only passionate involvement. Despite the asymmetries of love--love unrequited, unequal, betrayed--the poems give the impression that Merini cannot help giving herself to it. Borne on her surging emotion, the reader is thrown, with her, against the intransigency of male lust. "Roman Wedding" concludes with this ominous, yet exhilarating, image: Like a rock dividing waters, a young and raging current, recklessly, you will break me up in the arms of a painful delta . . . Out of this breaking arises self-knowledge, self-definition. The poem "Alda Merini" begins with a gentle ache: "I tenderly loved some very sweet lovers/ without them knowing anything about it." It moves toward...