Quail *
Mi chiamava " passerotto, mio dolce passerotto".
Era facile obbedirgli.
Un anno fa in Connecticut, ricordo il centro del suo corpo,
la spiaggia, un albero scarnito nella sabbia, le foglie che scolorano,
il parcheggio di una casa di riposo -
Quando potrò rivederlo , mi chiedevo
mentre ero con lui,
mi tolgo i calzini nella sabbia,
ed ancora il giorno dopo, quando non c'ero
e il giorno appresso ancora,
e il giorno che mi svegliai
e nevicava sul campo da tennis.
* In slang ragazza, donna.
Quail
He addressed me as “my quail, my sweet quail.”
He was easy to obey.
It was a year ago in Connecticut, I remember the middle of his body,
the beach, a hollowed out tree in the sand, changing leaves,
the parking lot of a senior citizens home—
When will I see him again, I asked myself
while I was with him,
taking off my socks in the sand,
and again the next day, when I wasn’t,
and the day after that,
and the day I woke up
and there was snow on the tennis court.
Richie Hofmann’s new book of poems, A Hundred Lovers, is forthcoming from Knopf in 2022. He is the author of Second Empire (2015), and his poetry appears recently in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and The Yale Review. A former Stegner Fellow, he teaches at Stanford University.
