PERFECT (true nature always is)
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The Elm’s Disease
As if it’s important that summer remain
here on the river’s bank, the tree sheds
its fainter leaves: mauve
petals of rare flowers
—and the motionless evergreens remain
for posterity.
But more importantly, the people walk cheerfully
the city moves toward the river and a gull
that ventured here sheds feathers
like bolts of lightning.
Guide me, wandering star, as long as you are able …
—and daylight melts the banks in honey and gold
then remelts them in an oily dark
until lights swarm.
A humming atom
springs from that creeping feeling, strikes me
right
where it stings and sears the most.
Come here, speak to me, tenderness,
—I say turning to a life
that until yesterday was so near
and today seems so distant—drive
this annoying thorn
of memory from me:
it’s never content.
It’s over—that shadow
whispers answering
in the last light—sleep now, lie down.
You have
taken the thorn, not
its pain—I sigh, giving myself to her
in the dream I am already plunging into.
By Vittorio Sereni
—Translated from the Italian by Ann Snodgrass
From issue no. 98 (Winter 1985)
#THE PARIS REVIEW
DAILY POEM
