Tonight a wind plays attentively
--mindful of that loud clashing of blades—
its instruments, the impenetrable trees, sweeping
a horizon of copper
where bars of light attenuate
like kites in a rolling sky
(Clouds in transit, bright
realms above! Of the high Eldorado’s
cracked doors!)
and the sea casting and casting itself,
a bruise, turning color,
a beached launch, a waterspout
of tortured froth;
a wind that is born and dies
over an hour that slowly blackens—
if only it might play you, too, tonight,
O, instrument gone out of tune—
my heart.
Eugenio Montale(1896 — 1981) was a Nobel-Prize-winning Italian poet, editor, translator, and legend.
Mary Jane White, MFA Iowa, NEA Fellowships (poetry and one in translation). Older poems and translations of Marina Tsvetaeva’s two cycles of poems addressed to Akhmatova appeared in APR as a feature, and then in Starry Sky to Starry Sky, appeared 1988 from Holy Cow! Press (Duluth, MN) New poems Dragonfly. Toad. Moon. appeared April 2022 from Press 53 (Winston-Salem, N.C.) New translations of Marina Tsvetaeva in After Russia, appeared 2021 from Adelaide Books, (NYC, Lisbon). Her memoir What It Took To Raise My Son With Autism, To Be His Own Person, Loose In The Universe appeared from Gratitude Press in 2024. Contact her at maryjanewhite@gmail.com.
