The heavy bear who goes with me

"the withness of the body" --Whitehead

The heavy bear who goes with me,
A manifold honey to smear his face,
Clumsy and lumbering here and there,
The central ton of every place,
The hungry beating brutish one
In love with candy, anger, and sleep,
Crazy factotum, disheveling all,
Climbs the building, kicks the football,
Boxes his brother in the hate-ridden city.

Breathing at my side, that heavy animal,
That heavy bear who sleeps with me,
Howls in his sleep for a world of sugar,
A sweetness intimate as the water's clasp,
Howls in his sleep because the tight-rope
Trembles and shows the darkness beneath.
--The strutting show-off is terrified,
Dressed in his dress-suit, bulging his pants,
Trembles to think that his quivering meat
Must finally wince to nothing at all.

That inescapable animal walks with me,
Has followed me since the black womb held,
Moves where I move, distorting my gesture,
A caricature, a swollen shadow,
A stupid clown of the spirit's motive,
Perplexes and affronts with his own darkness,
The secret life of belly and bone,
Opaque, too near, my private, yet unknown,
Stretches to embrace the very dear
With whom I would walk without him near,
Touches her grossly, although a word
Would bare my heart and make me clear,
Stumbles, flounders, and strives to be fed
Dragging me with him in his mouthing care,
Amid the hundred million of his kind,
the scrimmage of appetite everywhere.

Delmore Schwartz

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)