The Writing on the Wall

O aperti ai venti e all’onde
Liguri cimiteri!
Una rosea tristezza vi colora
Quando di sera, simile ad un fiore
Che marcise, la grande luce
Si va sfacendo e muore.
Vincenzo Cardarelli
(engraved on a wall of the public cemetery of Manarola of the Cinque Terre)

Above us on the terraces the vines
Are yellow-leaved, picked clean,
And, higher still, the autumnal Apennines
Are edged with mossy green.

Umbrella pines are leaning out to light
Across the paths which climb and climb
In stone-ribbed steps. The summit’s out of sight,
The ending out of time.

I’ve always dreamed of going home again
To where the green and gold combine,
So sure that getting back would help me gain
My place in that design.

Instead, my little broken history
Has left me far too much inclined
To value all that makes me think I’m free -
Or scared at what I’d find.

So now above this pastel-coloured town
Which looks as if it grew from clay,
I wait to watch the sun go calmly down
On yet another day

And where the horizon curves a blur of blue
And rosy pink as if a light
Has got itself entrapped within the view
Before it turned to night

Or as an artist’s careless thumb might smear
Decisions once so finely made
They merely seem like guesswork now. It’s here
My constant claim must fade:

For if we didn’t have a debt to time,
If light like flowers didn’t fall,
If stairs were not an ever upward climb,
We wouldn’t know at all

The little we’re allowed to learn. The bells
Of all the churches sound, resound,
Rebound off granite cliffs and marbled walls,
And circle, circle round.

Should we like children learn to be content
At last – at least - with what we’ve got?
That easy answer isn’t what I meant
At all, for I am not.

The brushstroke of an errant cypress bough
As if by chance precisely there
Defines the landscape as we see it now.
The choice is not despair

Or hope: it’s work, and work, and no escape.
The olive-trees are bound in stone
But bend and twist to find a final shape
And every one its own.
(published in The Yale Review, January 2009)