On the Obsolescence of Caphone

Starnino, Carmine (1970)

Original Text

Carmine Starnino. With English Subtitles. Kentville, Nova Scotia: Gaspereau Press, 2004.

1Last heard—with a lovely hiss on the "ph"—

2August 1982 during an afternoon game of scopa

3turned nasty. And now, missing alongside it,

4are hundreds of slogans, shibboleths, small

5depth charges of phrasing. Like an island-colony

6of sea-birds screeching our own special cry,

7I recall words all backwater squawk, recall

8the curmudgeonly clunk and jump of their song,

9a language dying out but always, someplace,

10going on, surfacing in a shoe salesman's patter

11or a grocer's chitchat, anywhere conversation's

12an inventory of old expressions marked down

13to near-nothing and preserved past all value,

14spoken but never found on a page. Yesterday I listened

15to some Italian roofers at work. Their hoots,

16guffaws and barkings-down to the truck. It was

17buckaroo stuff, their dialect. Barisi, I think.

18Eruptive, roguish, and hard-edged—a vigour

19any poem would pestle to powder. But in the way

20English can, by trumping up a term, pay out

21something more interesting than you intended

22—turn a smile into a smirk, make geese clack

23overhead, or declare a birch's bole drubbed bare

24by a storm—immigrant jabber can flush into

25the open a new word that shivers in the surprise

26and rush of its arrival, like that spurt of wine

27my uncle, with a single suck on a plastic hose

28threaded into a vat, would draw out, splashing,

29into my glass. You capish? I say "immigrant"

30but, really, what the hell do I know? A bunch

31of banked-up bales I was never born to. Hey stronzo,

32my uncle Louie would ring me early Saturday,

33think you can take a little break from slapping

34your dick around and help me? He dubbed it

35'na giobba, said it'd be 'nu minuto, but I knew

36he'd be exasperated at my speed and call me

37moosho-moosh and send me back to my book

38—reading was making me too stonato for chores

39he'd tell my father. Now I harvest my sounds

40from men like these, key my jargon to the spontaneous,

41try-it-on effects of their speech, diction gutsy

42with curses, urge my poems to unschool themselves,

43to roughen their step as they tramp and turn

44to hoist and stack. No word too proud of its station.

45No word dipped in oak-gall and soot. I want

46a homemade vocabulary, tough-vowelled and fierce

47for the sheetrock they shoveled, and the steel

48they bolted with a ratatatatatat, and the bricks

49they troweled with a one-on-two-bend-scoop-

50spread-tap-settle, and the sledges they whanged! on iron.

51For the meals they couldn't cook, but the rabbits

52they'd gut after knocking their heads with a cut of wood.

53For the plush boat-sized Chryslers they drove,

54the two packs-a-day they puffed, and the grapes they grew

55in gardens pegged-out with plums and pears,

56apple trees grafted with five varieties of apple

57and cherry trees spraying the ground with shade.

58A word for their conviction that all you needed

59was a wrench, a handshake, a little money down.

60A word for the ends they never failed to meet

61or the way they knew to drive a nail between

62the haft's wood and head to rescue a hammer,

63or the afternoons when, over espresso, they'd crack

64that women need a slap or two, to feel wanted,

65or the way they spoke, with mouths awakened,

66mouths quickened by the volatile, unprissy,

67impurifying syllables of gabbadosta, or scimunito

68or futtiti—itself a good word for the situation

69(No speak. Stai zitto. But me I was too much

70of a chacciaron' to stop and thus scostumato

71is what I was called when I was rude enough

72to talk back. Le parole son femmine, e i fatti

73son maschi—words are female and actions male,

74and they thought me femminiello, a bit faggoty

75in my careful, English talk. So what's what?

76My cousins ask when cornering me at weddings.

77Well, you got gots is what you got. Go zappa—

78go work in the fields. But I do, my friends, I do,

79and I fear that when the Italian in me is done

80scything his last square of grass he'll pick up

81and go, and the speech I heard and, at times, spoke

82will be the silence surrounding all my poems)

83that might one day leave my poems illiterate.

84I once dreamt of an eloquence like St. Ambrose's,

85unblemished and discreet, lapidary and fluent,

86augered by a swarm of bees hovering above

87his infant mouth. Today, instead, I want my language

88bashed to flinders and I will rummage among

89its bits and scraps, its dwindlings and debris,

90toting up the reusable versus the gone-for-good.

91(And futtiti? It means ef-you-see-kay-e-dee)

92I want to answer noise with noise, to hit upon

93subtitles that fit the gist of what I hear. I always

94thought of myself as an airborne assumption,

95spored here from some other place, now I realize

96I'm whatever comes across in the translation.

RPO poem Editors

Jim Johnstone

RPO Edition

2013

Special Copyright

Poem used with permission of the author.