POEMS
EUGENIO MONTALE
The Dead
The sea crashing against the opposing
shore lifts a cloud that spumes
tiU reabsorbed by the shoals. Here one day,
against this iron coast, we hurled our hope
higher than the heaving sea,
and the barren abyss turns green again
as once in days that saw us
stiu here among the living.
Now that the north wind smooths the raging knot
of brackish currents, driving them back
where they began, someone has hung his nets
on the slashed boughs, draping
the path that sinks down
out of sight -
bleached nets drying in the late cold
touch of the light, while overhead
the blue crystal of the sky blinks
and plunges to an arc of storm-lashed
horizon.
More than seaweed dragged
by the boiling now revealed, our life stirs
against such torpor: whatever in us
was resigned to limit, by one day stilled,
now seethes; between the strands weaving
branch to branch, the heart thrashes
like the gallinule
trapped in the meshes
where an icy stasis holds us fast,
motionless, migratory.
