When you go in the scent of must grabs you,
enfolds you, enticing, but in the memory of man
they haven’t made wine here, only that
the walls remember, seeping with centuries.
The time you spend here is viscous, in this place
suspended
over the valley where windows distorted by rain
drip slowly as always
offering vistas veiled in purple,
and ash-softened shadows fold one
into the other
backwards to an imperceptible point of union.
Here nothing is untoward,
nothing is deafening or discordant,
the cool of the entrance whispers of absence,
echoes half-forgotten, elusive dimensions,
a silence that sucks you in, beyond history.
Brenda Porster was born in Philadelphia, USA, where she received her B.A. in history at Swarthmore College before going on to do graduate work in English and Comparative Literatures at Columbia University. After moving to Florence, for many years she taught English language and literature in Italian secondary schools. She is now teaching English at the Universities of Florence and Bologna. She has published reviews and translations of Italian poetry in Italian literary magazines and web sites, and in 2004 her translation of the poetry collection A Sea Voyage in Search of Cacao… by Mack Domori (pseud.) was published by Guaraldi. Her poems have appeared in several magazines and web sites in Italy and abroad. The anthology Furori (Avagliano, 2002) includes a section dedicated to her poems in English, with facing translation by A. Sirotti, and a sequence of her Italian poems appears in Genesi (ed. E. Bigiani, Gazebo, 2005)