:
to you who note them plainly,
or me in this bird-yellow hour these houses
have to themselves, while the breeze
has breath enough to puff the toys in races
across our idle and impulsive pool,
stone-deaf to the sea breaking.
EUGENIO MONTALE
Arsenio
Hurricane weather!
The wind makes spindles of dust,
beats them over the roofs and on the empty
esplanade before the glass-faced hotels
where the horses stand, their heads in hoods,
nosing the ground.
On this day,
now quenched, now on fire, you go down
the road along the sea, while
again and again, rending the weave
of hours, comes a rattle
of castanets.
It is the signal of another sphere; follow it,
go on towards the horizon which raises
a lead-gray waterspout above its vortices,
more vagrant than they; a whirling club
of salty raincloud
thrust at the sky by the upstart element;
don't mind that your feet
drag through loose pebbles,
that you stumble through tangled
rags of seaweed on this beach: perhaps
you have reached the moment for which
you've been waiting, when you may stop
spelling to the end, link by link,
the chain that binds you-the old
march without motion,
the frenzy , Arsenio, of inertia. . . .
