Cafe Paszkowski

Amaretto for sweetness,
and the director's green tie:
spring is a muddy face at the window,
daylight exploding like grapes through the grey-blue curtain.
We leave too soon, delayed by trains, seasons, happiness.
This evening I offer you a tram.

From a romance of a lifetime ago
she left behind the red feather
perched so arrogantly in your hat
in this cafe of poets and ordinary people.
Red means no, tonight's sad merriment will lack passion:
look at the tattered rug on the back of that passing horse
trotting a Viennese waltz from an ancient musical.

Say that the world doesn't end here,
absorbed in an endless reflection of trays and drinks!
of customers spilling from revolving doors;
the masters and victims of waiters.

Who needs glory or love?
Here's the four page "Evening Mail",
the "Illustrated Italian", "Woman",
and for 40 cents and 10 cents tip
the sweetness of Amaretto.

Morning

The air is fine as a nosegay of flowers;
the sky buzzing with green and gold flies.
Without this light Parisian overcoat it would be possible to dance;
for all its softness this is the music of paradise.
A woman dressed in the Italian tricolor from a patriotic lithograph
escapes towards the east:
I never wanted to be her dog!
But to cry tenderly over the miracle of commuters:
a universal enigma caught from a calendar
rendering its victims tranquil as heifers.
Ah! we die from a love of gratuitous things.
The aniline air bathes me like a shirt stuffed in whitener.
I see everything:
salt-cod, tomato-heaven in the churned blue;
meniscus of guttering dimming the sea-green eyes of the shutters;
shades of men sunken in the transparent earth.
At a stroke I understand the axiom: Manners come from a child's laughter.
The drum of the sun beats on the barber's mirror favouring me with a smile;
and nothing but silence follows in the coolness of the hour.

(My hairline is reversed!)

Studio

A phone-box assembled from deep red planks of the sun
receives all messages;
each quarter a window on madness.
I myself am an opener of windows and senses:
colours sing like birds:
blue, yellow, green, cobalt,
vermillion, black and soft pink.
My eyes attract light and memory
from all points;
unravelling the rainbow.

Abandon objects, people, countries,
approach me as simple virgins,
drape yourselves about - everything has its place in the frame:
bottles of exotic liqueur, their labels,
Sher, Tvui, CÈsa;
a ripe fig;
watermelon that marbles the mouth;
red nipples, resting from love in the shade of summer brushwood;
flasks of wine, toys, newspapers,
naked bodies, florid posters:
MÈdrano Circus,
La GaÓte-Rochechouart;
the most sublime creations of international chaos
scattered over tables, pinned to the walls.

Unanswered letters,
telegrams,
business appointments, invitations:
here is the russian footman with the gold top-hat
brought back from Kiev in Marinetti's pocket;
a guitar,
the white pipe
labelled Gambier of Paris reg. trade mark,
and the young tulip stem
of a woman gone forever.
The words "Je t'aime", have been repeated too often
in too many languages;
these shelves of books are repulsive as the cadavers of old friends
Stendhal alone is still readable,
but the charcoal and chalk inscriptions
on the door and walls
echo sharply today's weird music:
"I'm at the cafe opposite";
"A. called at 5. Will come again";
"You lack appointments (like the rabbits)! Germaine";
"Anita Caputo, model, 57 rue de Vaugirard";
(Rue de Vaugirard! It's half my sorrow
to have wasted time down there, on a perfumed divan of Jichy and ether)
"R.R.L., phone 375";
"Remember to write to Irene, Fondukleskaja, D. 27"
"N.V., 104, prussian blue 3"

Cheap mysteries
paidfor with 24 hours of youth per day.
Studios of pink twenty-year-olds;
a profound blend of joy, beauty, misery and zits,
in these cubicles of the palace of art.

Enough to open the panes to break this spell;
take down the tent of the undulating street;
the white bowl of decaying
smokestacks, towers, chimneys, stars,
cities of Europe at the end of the night, and trains,
lined up, wired like theatres; trainfulls of nostalgia.
The whole earth nods off
in surfeit of desire; our hearts
spread out like flags.

Crossroads

You dissolve in face powder every night.
Inert gas blossoms in shop windows.
Aeroplanes radiate in the firmament!
Shoes of diamante and gold drag on the pavement
leaden as the mouths of doped hysterics;
cars, trams and royal carriages screech
like a flock of gulls hit by grapeshot.

"Talking to the driver is prohibited".

Who gives a shit?

Oh, to swim like fish in love with green drink
between these nets of perfume and Bengal.

Ardengo Soffici

translated by Laurie Duggan