BEACH RAINBOWS























WILLIAM ARROWSMITH'S NOTES SECTION
IN HIS TRANSLATIONS OF EUGENIO MONTALE'S POEMS
READ LIKE ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF SPRING
TAKING ME DEEPER INTO THE GARDEN OF VOICES

The voice, in short, in which poetry, fusing with life, becomes incarnate spirit, language ablaze, with something like divinity.  "Syria" (1951-52), Notes, p. 732. William Arrowsmith, The Collected Poems of Eugenio Montale 1925-1977.

Beach reading pitiless holiday,
grandchildren surround me,
digging sand dollars inflecting

multiplying treasures of rainbow,  
citing ancients on poetry
as a ladder to God, Montale

excuses himself. Daily decency
after reading names
in mid-day sun

memorial at Sant' Anna.
Desert flowers, lost shoe horns,
every written line evoking

road, underlined, referenced.
All I want in Little Testament,
no longer able to memorize.

Return to time among children
tenderness and cruelty
no love for God or opinions,

they make nature theirs
without worshipping.
Can I go back?

Dig my toes into sand.
Walk the beach.
Sandals and rain jacket.

Hooded for wind,
with my phone for photos,
finding sun reflecting foam

in tide pools. Clouds in sky,
clouds in sand. Close-up, abstracted
for patterns. The road ahead

is not a way. So beautiful.
Like jazz. Grasses with shadows
drawn towards early sun,

one burnt log banking sand
in earlier wind, stammering
like that log, sastrugi sand,

rousing language. Happy
kids selling washing machines.
A way out of memory,

mind. Where I find,
Heat, Lightning. Where
the poet laureate found it.

Did it make them brothers?
Children face the ocean
with two shovels, animated

themselves by sea, surf
pounding 12-year old hearts.
Me in sinking lawn chair

rocking, wool gloves
around my fingers writing
in a notebook. I have also

spent my life facing
memorials luchando\
mi fé, finding confidence

in the other, in others,
my other, now in Arrowsmith's
Montale: dissolved

into other, at the point
just before saying yes--
elsewhere, too, partly

how we apprehend
what children inhabit,
ineffably, momentarily, again.

Jim Bodeen
3-5 April 2018





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