Dario Bellezza

Trans. by Peter Covino

Practical Activities

from Home

If the poet is reduced to carrying out
practical activities, to get by
using the phone, hustling, working
even against God, or the more 
lowercase god of poetry, who
should we blame? Or if by going
in winter, into the tepid cold
in the heart of January toward Campo dei Fiori
you meet a young man who’s passed by
crime’s true domain 
and craves you along the slack
river, in the muck, wind
encroaching, ripping you apart, leaving
awestruck by cum, who is
to blame?
But the days pass, a lifetime
without complaint, comforted by
the idea that there’s still life ahead,
and it’s long, even if tomorrow we could
die, just breathing  

Poet-editor-translator Peter Covino, Associate Professor of English at the University of Rhode Island, is the author of the poetry collections The Right Place to Jump; and Cut Off the Ears of Winter both from New Issues, Western Michigan UP; and the co-edited Essays in Italian American Literature, Bordighera/CUNY. His awards include a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship, the PEN American/Osterweil Award. He is a Founding Editor of Barrow Street Press.

Dario Bellezza (1944–1996) was an openly gay prizewinning, Italian poet-novelist (Viareggio Prize, 1976; Montale Prize, 1994) who died a premature death of AIDS related complications. His work was championed by such luminaries of twentieth-century Italian, and American literature as Pier Paolo Pasolini, Alberto Moravia, Elsa Morante, Allen Ginsburg, and Gregory Corso.