The Lemon Trees

Listen: the poets laureate
walk only among plants
with precious names, like box, acanthus, privet.
Me, I love the streets that fade
to grassy ditches, where from arid puddles
young lads scoop
a few emaciated eels:
tracks that wind along the slopes
and slither downwards through the tufted canes
to lose themselves among the lemon groves.

Better if the yakking of the birds
be suffocated, swallowed by the blue:
it's easier to hear the whispering
of friendly branches in the almost breathless air,
to breathe this odour
grounded in the earth, that drills
its sweet disturbing rain into our breasts.
Here, by a miracle, the war
of thwarted passions is assuaged,
here even we poor folk are dealt our share of riches,
which is the fragrance of the lemon trees.

See, in these silences where things
resign themselves and seem
about to yield their final secret,
sometimes we feel we're on the verge
of stumbling on a vault in Nature,
the still pivot of the world, the untenable link,
the thread which, disentangled, might at last
direct us to a central truth.
The eye delves,
the mind investigates aligns divorces
in this perfume that contrives to bloom
when day is most lethargic.
Silences where one can see
in every fleeting human shade
some wandering Divinity.

But the illusion wanes and in time returns us
to an urban hubbub where the blue
appears in patches only, high among the rooftops.
Rain falls bleakly on the earth then;
winter tedium weighs on the house,
the light grows miserly, the soul embittered.
Till one day from an ill-shut gateway
from a tree-filled close
the lemons burst out in a blaze of yellow
and the ice in the heart melts
and we are smitten to the core
by arias pelted forth
from golden horns of elemental sun.

Eugenio Montale (tradução de Ciaran Carson)