The Meteor

Blackout. Above me the sky shone a pale, clear blue.
No one was there, no one near— except you,
faraway Rio Salto, who flowed past my home.

I didn’t hear you. All I heard was your road crew
of frogs, out announcing the water and always
more water to pulp mills and farms.

I thought of the past. I recalled how,
at twenty, still fearful of life, I felt I’d die too
in some blood-spattered way. And alone,

late at night, I would come to this path
where my enemy might lie in wait in the dark.
I walked slowly, so slowly, my heart

in my throat while I feigned perfect calm
so he would see I was brave (though
I’d startle at wind, or a firefly’s spark):

slowly, I crept, and my heart leapt ahead.
And what then? A crash—laid out flat
on the path, I’d be gasping, alone . . .

but not alone. The graveyard is near.
Memorial lamps dimly kindling stones.
My mother would come, a hand

brushing my skin, and I’d feel her tears
on my wound like cool dew in the dark.
The others, too, will draw nearer

and gather me up from the path
and with faint cries, they’ll carry me off
to their land, and they’ll care for me

there—where you smile unending
above your sloped pallet now padded
with mosses and grass, like a nest.

And musing I heard (beyond grapevines
and next to the edge of a ditch, by an elm)
a rough hiss, and a flash, a blast . . . blasting

open, and glowing, and falling, fallen
from the infinite flicker of stars:
a globe of gold that dove mutely toward fields

as if diving toward empty layers of mist,
itself empty as mist—and inside
its instant, it lit all the hedges

and trenches and huts, and clusters
of forest, and night-drifting rivers
and the white, towered towns in the distance.

Enraptured, I asked: Did you see?
But there was only the sky, high and serene.
Not the sound of a step, or silhouette.

The sky, nothing more: dark sky,
surging with huge stars; a sky in which
it seemed the world had been submerged.

And I felt the earth inside the universe.
Shaking, I felt earth as part of the sky. And saw
myself down here, bewildered and small,

wandering on a star among stars.

- Giovanni Pascoli, trans. from Italian by Taije Silverman

Fog

Hide what is far from my eyes,
pale fog, impalpable gray
vapor climbing the light
                    of the coming day,
after the storm-streaked night,                    
the rockfall skies…

Hide what has gone, and what goes,
hide what lies beyond me…
Let me see only that hedge                    
at my boundary,
and this wall, by whose crumbling edge
                    valerian grows.

Hide from my eyes what is dead:
the world is drunk on tears…
Show my two peach trees in bloom,
                    my two pears,
that spread their sugared balm
                    on my black bread.

Hide from my eyes lost things
whose need for my love is a goad...
Let me see only the white
                    of the stone road –
I too will ride it some night
                    as a tired bell rings.

Hide the far things – hide
them beyond the sweep of my heart...
Show only that cypress tree,
                    standing apart,
and here, lying sleepily,
                    this dog at my side.

- Giovanni Pascoli, trans. from Italian by Geoffrey Brock