but breaks the heart of the air.
– Carlo Betocchi
25. The Lemons
Listen: the prize-winning poets
only bother with the plants
that have fancy names: boxwood, privet, acanthus.
But I love the streets that end
in grassy ditches, where boys
ambush haggard eels in half-dry pools;
traces that follow embankments
and descend through clumps of reeds,
to die out in orchards
among the lemon trees.
Let the gabbling of birds
fade, swallowed by the blue:
then you’ll hear the whisper
of friendly branches in the lazy air
and breathe this fragrance,
inseparable from the earth, that rains
a sweet shiver on the heart.
Here the warring passions
are miraculously stilled; here
even we paupers can find
our measure of riches,
which is the fragrance of lemons.
In this stillness where things
lose their bearings and come close
to giving up their final secret,
you sometimes expect to find
an oversight of Nature:
the still point of the world, the link that snaps,
the unraveling thread that puts you finally
at the center of some truth.
You cast your gaze about,
your mind asks, reconciles, dissolves
in the perfume that drifts across
the languid afternoon.
These are the silences in which you see
in every extending human shadow
some restless Divinity.
But the illusion fades, and time drags us back
to the noisy city, where the blue shows
only in fragments, high up, among the cornices.
Rain belabors the earth, winter ennui
stuffs the houses,
miserly light embitters the soul.
And then one day, through the crack of a door,
among the trees of a courtyard
the yellow of the lemons flares;
your frozen heart thaws
and is pelted with their songs,
those golden trumpets of light.
– Eugenio Montale
26. Delta
I bequeath you this life
that has poured itself out in secret:
this smothered, writhing presence
that seems hardly to know you.
When time’s flow is impounded,
then, memory, you meander
and conform yourself to its spread,
blossom from your darkness,
as now this rain deepens the green
of leaves and the walls’ brick red.
I know nothing of you;
only the silent law that draws me on my way.
Whether you’re real, or just some dread
formed from the smoke of dreams,
it’s the muddy fever coast,
colliding with the tides,
that nourishes you.
Nothing of you in the wagging, doubtful hours,
or torn from a blast of sulfur;
but only the hoot of the tug, as it
condenses from the mists on the gulf.
– Eugenio Montale
27. The Eel
The eel, the siren
of the ocean, who flees the icy Baltic
for our warmer seas,
for our rivers and bays,
who ascends them in the depths,
below the opposing flood,
from branch to branch, and then
trickle to thinning trickle,
deeper and deeper into the heart
of the rock, slipping through
the thickening muck, until one day
a light strikes through chestnut trees
to fire those needles in stagnant pools,
in ditches that slope from the vault
of the Appenines down to the Romagna.
The eel: torch, whip,
arrow of Love on earth,
which only our dry creeks
can quicken to swarming excess;
the green spirit that sprouts
only there, in the jaws of drought
and desolation, the spark
that insists all begins
when it seems that all
is charred and buried;
a brief iridescence, the twin
of that for which your lashes
are the setting, and that you flash
out at men from the depths
of what you think is only mud -–
can’t you believe it, my sister?
– Eugenio Montale
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