La Figlia che Piange

‘Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent:Σίβυλλα τίθέλεις; respondebat illa:άποθανεîνθέλω.’ For Ezra Pound
il miglior fabbro. I. The Burial of the Dead

canto iv

A hard thunder broke my sleep.
As if roused by a god,

I stood straight up;
my rested eyes moved about,

seeking acquaintance
with place.

I found myself

From there he sailed farther on, and sadder.
Standing at the stern he looked out darkly
till the Cyclopes’ land turned slowly into view.
He saw the island’s unfarmed peak
that rose up sharp and high as if to mark itself
apart, and watched a fire’s smoke unfold
from where a shepherd lulled it.
But those who bent to pull the oars

S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma percioche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,
Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.

‘þis were a wikkede wey but whoso hadde a gyde
þat [myȝte] folwen us ech foot’: þus þis folk hem mened.
Quod Perkyn þe Plowman, ‘By Seint Peter of Rome!
I haue an half acre to erie by þe heiȝe weye;
Hadde I eryed þis half acre and sowen it after
I wolde wende wiþ yow and þe wey teche.’
‘þis were a long lettyng,’ quod a lady in a Scleyre.
‘What sholde we wommen werche þe while?’

1

What does not change / is the will to change

He woke, fully clothed, in his bed. He
remembered only one thing, the birds, how
when he came in, he had gone around the rooms
and got them back in their cage, the green one first,
she with the bad leg, and then the blue,
the one they had hoped was a male

Sparrows tapping your shutters louvres? snow owls
guano your eaves? Spring rainstorms sway
in your gutters; down-cellar a green pipe pearls

and roots find its fissures. Matter—outside us, out in le Vrai,
matter—un-does; fatiscit; a sort of eternal
breakdown and sloughage. Small wonder that Saturday

finds you botanizing some mast-high aisle
in the Depot. Fazed by stock-names and numbers, distinctions

legato con amore in un volume
ciò che per l’universo si squaderna . . . If what began (look far and wide) will end:
This lava globe huddle and freeze, its core

Era gia l’ora che volge il desio. – Dante
Ricorro al tempo ch’io vi vidi prima. – Petrarca
I wish I could remember that first day,

There’s a barrel-organ carolling across a golden street
In the City as the sun sinks low;
And the music's not immortal; but the world has made it sweet
And fulfilled it with the sunset glow;
And it pulses through the pleasures of the City and the pain
That surround the singing organ like a large eternal light;
And they’ve given it a glory and a part to play again
In the Symphony that rules the day and night.