The Country Whore

The big front wall that blocks off the courtyard

often catches the newborn light of the sun

like the side of a barn. The body awakes

in the morning to a room, messy and empty,

that smells of the first, clumsy perfume.

Even that body, wrapped now in sheets,

is the same that it was when it thrilled in discovery.

Her body wakes alone to the extended call

of morning, the languor of another morning

returning in the heavy shadows: the barn

of childhood and the heavy tiredness of sun

hot in the indolent doorways. A perfume

worked itself into the usual sweat

of her hair, a smell the animals knew.

Her body took secret pleasure in the sun’s

suggestive, serene caress—like a real touch.

The languor of bed saps the sprawled limbs,

still youthful and plump, like a child’s.

The clumsy child used to smell the mixed scent

of tobacco and hay, used to tremble when touched

by the man’s quick hands: she liked playing games.

Sometimes she played lying down with the man

in the hay, but he wasn’t smelling her hair:

he’d find her closed legs in the hay and pry

them open, then crush her like he was her father.

The perfume was flowers ground upon stones.

It often returns, in the slow rise from sleep,

that undone aroma of far-off flowers,

of barns and of sun. No man can know

the subtle caress of that sour memory.

No man can see, beyond that sprawled body,

that childhood passed in such clumsy anxiety.

Copyright Credit: Cesare Pavese, "The Country Whore" translated by Geoffrey Brock, from Disaffections: Complete Poems 1930-1950. Copyright © 2002 by Geoffrey Brock. Reprinted by permission of Copper Canyon Press. www.coppercanyonpress.org

Source: Dissaffections: Complete Poems 1930-1950 (Copper Canyon Press, 2002)