Villa La Massa and its sovereign view
of summer heat, the Arno shimmering
in its slow move from hills to town
and we admired how the swallows skim
their own reflection in the stream,
their wings untouched by water
and you expressed concern at this great cost
of energy against small gain—
a tiny insect against power lost
in that great swoop and up again—
angling to find your answer in
the Bibled God who watches all
and I reminded you He sees
the sparrow fall but does not catch
its plummet to uncaring soil.
Later in town we saw a truck parked on the wrong side of the street,
white, with red writing on its unforgiving walls:
SANGUE e ORGANI
a curbside hospital,
dispenses and receives, hacks out,
its grim collateral.
Again on the carved terrace as I watched
geese float against the river’s flow,
the troubled sky for some time holding back
its rain, and listened as a single church bell cut
the hour in half and then again made whole.
I wondered if the answer was
the fish that leaps
out of the water to recall
the gnat to its own darkness
as we all must feed.
Jean Hollander is the author of Crushed into Honey, which won the Eileen W. Barnes Award, as well as verse translations of Dante’s Inferno, (with Robert Hollander) and Purgatory. Her translation of Paradise will be released in 2007. Her poems have appeared in many magazines and anthologies, such as American Scholar, Southern Humanities Review, Poet Lore, The Kenyon Review, Literary Review, and The Sewanee Review. She has taught literature and writing at Princeton University, Brooklyn College, Columbia University, and The College of New Jersey, where she was director of Writers' Conferences.
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