This originally was a prose-ish reportage post, but turned into a poem...I'm justifying it as reportage because it lays out things I've witnessed this week.
Translating Italian
While you're standing in line
at the one fast food place,
I sit, waiting for you and your friends,
dressed in running shorts and wife beaters,
to finish ordering pizza and cheeseburgers
in Charleston accented Italian and leave.
I know enough Italian to know that you don't know
enough. I'm all about voyeurism these days.
We're all observing a life we're not supposed to.
All allowing ourselves to be a part of some Carravaggio,
like the "Burial of St. Lucy," and the grave diggers
of Spoleto aren't letting you in, unlike me.
It's all about respect here. All about that outfit of black,
the costume of provincial life that the teenagers can't grasp.
I walked past a man with a Frosted Flakes shirt and yellow
jeans, something you can't buy for less that 89 euro here.
The city blocks it's own from economic prosperity.
Stuck in limbo, between city and country, Spoleto
and I waver--not American, but not fully Italian,
stripped of whatever culture I'm supposed to be defined by,
not quite naked, but not covered in the cotton of Thailand
either. It's a charade, like the one we played in language class,
where I pulled scrivere and started to scribble waves of blue
on the board. Can you guess the word, the translation, and
the person I'm supposed to be after this?
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