A Casalinga in Spring
Andrew Frisardi
Orvieto
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​A needle in the haystack of her housecoat.
She’s lugging a bucket and a hand-stained stick,
Throwing a white rag down in the corridors
Of marmo finto, then out on the flagstone walk,
Darkened with streaks of runoff. The west wind
From the foothills of Amiata, winging in sheets,
Rushes the clothesline like a feathered bull,
A Maremmano fresh from grazing salt,
Suddenly in love with lilies.
She is the widowed handmaid of the lord,
Her husband. She says the dead are free. She bends
To wring the winter hours from her hands.
Her curved back forms a question mark.
Her windows bloat curtains like cherubs chanting
Ammonia alleluias, and her eyes
And nostrils flare against the scouring light.
It might be Easter but then again it’s not.
The mophead that she pushes never dies.
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casalinga = housewife; marmo finto = imitation marble flooring; Amiata = a mountain northwest of Orvieto; Maremmano = here, a bull bred on the Maremma, a region in Tuscany on the west coast​
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​Andrew’s notes: “This poem, revised from my collection The Harvest and the Lamp, is in memory of Marcella, a good neighbor and friend of my wife and me during our years in Orvieto. She befriended us deracinated American expats, made us feel welcome, and drank brandy with us by the fire on cold winter evenings. She had lived through World War II and had a keen intellect, though poverty kept her at work rather than school in her teens, and she rarely ventured outside Orvieto. It was from her that I first heard Dante’s Italian—its turns of phrase and idioms—alive and well in contemporary speech. Like many old-time housewives of central Italy (including my grandmother Paola), she possessed a survivor’s grit and held up her family. Marcella died a year or two before the pandemic of 2020.“
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Andrew Frisardi is a writer, translator, and editor. He has published a number of books, including the poetry collections The Harvest and the Lamp and The Moon on Elba, and annotated translations of Dante’s pre-Comedy works the Vita nova and Convivio. Lately he has been translating the poems of Maria Luisa Spaziani, two of which are in the Fall 2025 Hudson Review.
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Pic credits:
’Orvieto, Italy’, by ecstk22 (via Shutterstock)
’Toro di razza maremmana a Vulci’, by Giovanni Bidi (via Wikipedia)
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