IV

Today, the monotonous oratory of the dead,

ashes, lethargic winds-

a reluctant trickle drips

from the thatched huts.

Time is water.

The rain rains down black letters-

a contemptu mundi! What part of me does it bring you?

The eel, the North Sea siren,

Now at this late hour

who leaves dead-pan Icelandic gods

and the Baltic for our Mediterranean,

of my watch and your endless, prodigal sleep,

my tiny straw city is breaking up.

The porcupine sips a quill of mercy.

The Eel
I

i
!
f
~

Montale: Noti;:;ie Jail' Amiata.

our estuaries, our rivers-

who lances through their profound places,

and flinty portages, from branch to branch,

twig to twig, thinning down now,
ever snaking inward, worming
for the granite's heartland, threading
delicate capillaries of slimeand 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 is clinker;
this buried rainbow, this iris, twin sister

12

12 5

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 mud

can you call her Sister?

II
If 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)

if they can only think of you

as a weasel or a woman,

with whom can I share my discovery,

where bury the gold I carry,

the red-hot, pot-bellied furnace raging

inside me, when, leaving me,

you turn up stairs?

Montale: L'anguilla; Se t'hanno assomigliato.

I

lill)111

IIII
I

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 blond 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 luminous target,
the furrow I pricked there in blood,
cross, chrism, incantation,-and
prayer---damnation, salvation;

126

12

1
1