Writing
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The LemonTrees
Eugenio Montale (Trans. Anne Schuchman) Listen to me, the poet laureates move only among fauna with obscure-sounding names: boxwoods, privet, or acanthus. For my part, I love the roads that end in grassy ditches where in half-dry puddles boys grab at a few haggard eels: the paths that follow along the shoreline, then move down between the tufts of reeds and into the gardens, among the lemon trees. Better still, if the riotous songs of the birds are silenced, swallowed up by the blue: you can hear more clearly the whisper of friendly branches in the air that just barely moves, and the intensity of this scent that cannot be separated from the earth and a restless sweetness rains in the heart. Here the war of conflicted passions by some miracle falls silent, here even the poor, we have our share of riches-- and it is the smell of the lemon trees. See, in these silences where things abandon themselves and seem close to revealing their final secret, we sometimes expect to discover a defect of Nature, the dead point of the world, the link that does not hold, the thread that, unravelled, might finally lead us to the center of a truth. The gaze rummages around, the mind inquires, brings together, breaks apart in the perfume that spreads out when the day languishes most. These are the silences in which you see in every human shadow that moves away some disturbed Divinity. But the illusion is fleeting and time brings us back to the noisy cities where the blue shows itself only in pieces, up above, between the rooftops. The rain wearies the earth; the tedium of winter grows heavy on the houses, the light becomes stingy - the soul bitter. Then one day, through a door left ajar, among the trees in a courtyard the yellows of the lemon trees are revealed; and the chill of the heart melts away, and in our chest they roar their songs the golden trumpets of sunshine. |
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