Delta

That life breaking off, secretly transfusing mine, I have bound to you: of you, your stifled presence, that conflicted life seems almost unaware.

When Time backs up behind its weir, you adjust your days to that vast flood; and, brighter than before, memory manifest, you rise from that dark world where you descended, as now, after rain, the green of the trees intensifies, on walls the cinnabar.

I know nothing of you, only your speechless message that sustains me on my way. Whatever you are, phantasma or vision in the blur of a dream, the force that feeds you is the seething of this feverish torrent crashing against the tide.

No sign of you in the flickering hours of gray fog cleft by flares of sulphur. Only the whistle of the tug looming from the fog, making for shore.

From “Cuttlefish Bones” by Eugenio Montale, translated from the Italian by William Arrowsmith (W.W. Norton: $25). Montale was born in Genoa in 1896. He was an infantry officer in World War I, and in 1948 became chief literary critic for Italy’s primary newspaper, Corriere della Sera. Montale published seven collections of poetry in his lifetime. “Cuttlefish Bones” was first published in 1925 . Montale died in Milan in 1981.

Copyright 1992 by the estate of William Arrowsmith.