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IV
Today, the monotonous oratory of the dead,
ashes, lethargic winds-
a reluctant trickle drips
from the thatched huts.
Time s water.
The rain rains down black letters-
a contemptu mundi What part of me does it bring you?
Now at this late hour
of my watch and your endless, prodigal sleep,
my tiny straw city s breaking up.
The porcupine sips a quill of mercy.
Montale: Noti;:;ie Jail
Amiata.
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The el
I
The eel, the
North
Sea siren,
who leaves dead-pan Icelandic gods
and the Baltic for our Mediterranean,
our estuaries, our rivers-
who lances through their profound places,
i
and flinty portages, from branch to branch,
twig to twig, thinning down now,
ever snaking inward, worming
f
for the granite's heartland, threading
delicate capillaries of slime-
and
in the Romagna one morning
the blaze of the chestnut blossoms
ignites its smudge in the dead water
pooled from chiselings
of the Apennines
the eel, a whipstock, a Roman candle,
love's arrow on earth, which only
reaches the paradise of fecundity
through our gullies and fiery, charred streams;
a green spirit, potent only
where desolation
and
arson
burn;
a spark that says everything
begins where everything
s
clinker;
this buried rainbow, this iris, twin sister
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of the one you set in your eye's target center
to shine on the sons of men,
on us, up to our gills in your life-giving
m u -
can you call her
Sister?
f they called you a fox,
it will be for your monstrous hurtle,
your sprint that parts
and
unites,
that
kicks up and freshens the gravel,
(your black lace balcony, overlooking
the home for deformed children, a meadow,
and a tree, where my carved name quivers,
happy, humble, defeated)
or perhaps only for the phosphorescent wake
of your
almond
eyes,
for the craft of your alert panic,
for the annihilation of dishevelled feathers
in your child's
hand s
python hug;
if they have likened you to the blon d lioness,
to
the avaricious
demon
of the
undergrowth
(and
why not to the filthy fish
that electrocutes, the torpedo fish?)
it is
perhaps because the blind
have not seen the wings
on
your delectable shoulder-blades,
because the blind haven't shot for
your forehead's lum inous target,
the furrow I pricked there in blood,
cross, chris m, incantation,-and
prayer---damnation, salvation;
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if they can only
think
of you
as
a weasel or a woman,
with whom can I share my discovery,
where bury the gol d I carry,
the red-hot, pot-bellied furnace raging
inside me, when, leaving me,
you turn up stairs?
Montale: L'anguilla;
e
t'hanno assomiglia
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