Ferruccio Brugnaro, Italian Poet

In Venice, Beth and I met up with native Venetian Beat Bard Alessandro Spinazzi. Sandro said to meet him on the Rialto bridge at 2PM, and when I asked him how we would know him, he said "Because I look like you!' We spent the afternoon at a very pleasant street cafe, and the next evening we went to the home Sandro shares with his wife Katy. Sandro had invited the poet Ferruccio Brugnaro and his wife Maria. A wonderful evening of food, wine, poetry and friendship.

Ferruccio is also a native Venetian, and worked for much of his life in the industrial zone of Marghera, just west of Venice, on the mainland. A Communist, an activist, a lifelong poet, Ferruccio has recently read at festivals in San Francisco and Cuba. His work is available here in the United States in a collection called Fist of Sun, translated by Jack Hirschman and published by Curbstone Press, and in a collection for his wife Maria, called Portrait of A Woman, also translated by Jack Hirschman and published by CC Marimbo Press.

Here is a poem called We Don't Want Bosses, Period (from Fist of Sun)

We don't want bosses of any kind,

period.

They've already splashed around

in our blood,

already feasted plenty

on our lives.

Stop asking us so many questions.

Look at our injuries

the damage done to peasants

and miners.

We've gotta yank this plant out of the world

once and for always.

Don't ask anything else of us. We've really

made up our guts.

We don't want bosses

because they're

the same as ever:

because they want the land

all for themselves,

because they want the sun

all for themselves,

because they never stop

robbing, trampling,

and killing, killing

day and night under every kind of sky.

and a poem from Portrait of A Woman, for his wife, Maria:

Sometimes Maria sings

the most intense songs.

Songs I've never

heard before

that aren't heard

anywhere

She sings, sometimes explodes

wordlessly

with her songs

packed with

history.

She sings tirelessly of things,

unknown

events

she moves, sways,

she sings

profound joys to me.

Sings to me, invents, makes up

songs for me

does Maria

returning sometimes

in the middle of the night

songs that can't be described

can't be re-told.

italian history of the west

In San Gimignano, a hilltop town of many towers, we stay in a small hotel facing the central piazza. On a table in a common area I find, among the Italian fashion magazines, two issues of Mountain Gazette, where I find this "New History of the West":

Kill all the Indians.
Kill anything with fur.
Mine all the mountains.
Cut down all the trees.
Dam the rivers.
Ski.
Ryan Dingus

italia

nobody knows us here we're

moving down the mountain we're

looking for a river we're

looking for a cloud we're

looking for a language we're

looking for a sign we're

looking for a story that will

tell us when we're home

gary lawless

Italian relics

Usually when we go to Italy I am on the lookout for relics, looking in the Catholic churches for body parts, pieces of saints, bones, teeth, blood, breath, pieces of the True Cross and thorns from the crown of thorns. This trip had a slight variation on that theme.
In Rome we went to the Spanish Steps, and the Keats/Shelley museum, the rooms where Keats died, facing the Spanish Steps. There they have locks of hair from Keats, Shelley and Milton, collected by Leigh Hunt, and also a piece of Shelley's jaw (with a quote from one of the women in their circle saying that she couldn't bear to see the jaw, as she would remember the lips that once covered it, and the words which came from those lips...)Shelley's heart, saved by Trelawney from the funeral pyre, is not there. Mary took it with her.
In the north of Italy, in the south Tyrol/Dolomites/Alto Adige we went to the city of Bolzano, to the Museum of the South Tyrol, where the oldest relic going in Italy is housed - The Ice Man. The Ice Man dates to 5400 years old, frozen into a glacier high up in the mountains and found emerging from the ice by two hikers. A storm in the Sahara had deposited a dark layer of sand on the ice, causing melting (of course, along with global warming) and the eventual exposure of the Ice Man. Italy and Austria argued over which country would house the relics, and the international border was surveyed, showing the Ice Man to be about 20 meters into Italy.
Relics have always brought pilgrims, tourists, and business. Bolzano has created a lovely museum to house the Ice Man. They feature, of course, a look at him, but also create a story and a context for each article of his clothing, his tools, his first aid kit, his weapons. The museum looks at everything from his tattoos to his bearskin soled shoes, from his fleas and tick, stomach parasites and blue eyes to his arsenic levels (high, probably from taking part in the smelting of metals). He has mushrooms in his first aid kit, to stop bleeding, and carried two birchbark containers lined with leaves. He was killed by an arrow in the back, and died clutching a dagger in his hand. It is an amazing thing to come face to face with someone from so long ago and yet, right there. I sat on a chair in the museum and wrote this little poem:

Ice Man Sutra (Bolzano)

where everything is revealed.
These are the mountains.
These are the mountains
beyond the mountains.
This is the sky.
This is the sky
beyond the sky.
This is the moment
beyond the mountains
beyond the sky.

Basket (Kimberly Callas, Gary Lawless)

Basket offers
the arms of the plant world
to hold you secure and
at rest, dreaming
in three worlds at once -
below the surface
at the surface
above the surface
breathing darkness, air
and light

****************

breath of a wind from
another world -
cold air from
deep space through
the Pleiades, Sisters
give you a dream, say
here, hold this, fill
your basket your
emptiness here -
breathe



If you would like a free copy of our chapbook Basket, Notes Toward a Field Guide" with poems, drawings and notes from the collaboration, please email your mailing address to chimfarm@gwi.net .

poet in new york

Photos:

Gary at Bowery Poetry Club

Gary with Judith Schwartz, Simon Pettet and Brenda Coultas

Beth and Gary, in Central Park Zoo, with Gary's poem

Gary with poem

Polar Bears in Central Park Zoo, from site of Gary's poem

So Beth and I went to New York City. We had not been there for over 30 years, but George Wallace invited me to read at the Bowery Poetry Club, so that served as an excuse, and some wonderful friends loaned us their apartment, so off we went.

I did read at the Bowery Poetry Club, where we met up with friends George Wallace, Chris Martin, Paul Pines, Judith Schwartz, Simon Pettet, and where we met Brenda Coultas. After the reading we walked with Simon to the Saint Mark's Bookstore, where I bought Brenda's book A Handmade Museum - what a powerful book. A real treasure.

The next day we went to the Central Park Zoo, to see a poem of mine on a wall near the polar bears. A couple of years ago poet Sandra Alcosser had some kind of artist in residence gig at the zoo, and did permanent installations of a number of poems (Old Walt Whitman thinking that he could go and live with the animals, Sappho, Elizabeth Bishop, Frank O'Hara, Naomi Nye, and here I am as we walk along toward the bears.) I had foolishly asked if my poem could face the bears, and not the onlookers, but if you turn around while reading the poem, the bears are there. The poem now, written maybe 20 years ago, seems prophetic when you consider the fate of these polar bears in the face of global warming.

Here is the poem:

Treat each bear as the last bear.

Each wolf the last, each caribou.

Each track the last track.

Gone spoor, gone scat.

There are no more deertrails,

no more flyways.

Treat each animal as sacred,

each minute our last.

Ghost hooves. Ghost skulls.

Death rattles and

dry bones.

Each bear walking alone

in warm night air.

Memorial Day at Chimney Farm

Memorial Day at Chimney Farm. We have given Elizabeth Coatsworth a fox for her grave. Foxes appear in many of her books and poems, including her books Fox Footprints, The Fox Friend, and here, in a piece called The Fox-Woman, in Personal Geography:"Of what are you afraid? Of the loneliness in the heart of the fox, or of the beauty with which she has clothed herself on this spring evening? You would not be afraid if you saw me running along the ground with the dew wet on my fur and the stars shining in my eyes.

We are all visions, dreamed by the gods as they sleep."

There are many colorful birds at the feeder these days - orioles come for the orange slices, a cardinal couple and rose breasted grosbeaks at the feeder, among others.

We have a list of apple varieties planted here at the farm by William Hall in the 1870s: Baldwin, Fameuse, Foundling, Golden Russet, Gravenstein, Granite Beauty, Hurlbut, King of Tompkins County, Jonathan, Marshall, Minister, Northern Spy, Porter, Red Astrakhan, Rhode Island Greening, Sweet Bough, Talman's sweet, and Yellow Bellflower.

Several years ago we planted Golden Russet and Fameuse, and this year Nancy Holmes brought us Northern Spy, Baldwin, and Astrakhan, so we are on our way to restoring the old apple orchards here. If anyone has a line on any of the varieties we do not have, please let us know. We want to thank Nancy Holmes, John Bunker, Dr. George Dow and mary Sheldon for apple advice so far.