Montale’s Grave

Now that the ticket to eternity has your name on it, we are here to pay the awkward tribute post-modernity allows to those who think they think your way but hear you only faintly, filtered through a gauze of echoes, sounding in a voice that could be counterfeit; and yet the noise seems to expand our notion of the true. A high forehead, landscape drunk on light, mother-of-pearl that flashes in the night: intimations of the miracle when the null steps forward as the all-- these were signals, sparks that spattered from the anvil of illusions where you learned the music of a generation burned by an old myth: the end that will not come. There is no other myth. This sun-drenched yard proves it, freighted with the waiting dead, where votive plastic hyacinths relay the promise of one more technicolor day --the promise that is vouchsafed to you, scribe, and your dictator, while your names get blurred with all the others, like your hardest word dissolving in the language of the tribe. From “Morning Run” (Paris Review Editions/British American Publishing: $14.95 , cloth; $7.95 , paper; 90 pp.). Galassi, whose poetry has appeared in many leading periodicals and in the anthology “Ten American Poets,” is also an editor of poetry and a translator particularly noted for his translations of work by Eugenio Montale (1896-1981), the symbolist or “hermetic” Italian poet who was also a courageous and influential anti-fascist critic. 1988, Jonathan Galassi. Reprinted by permission of British American Publishing.