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