Six Poems

At Montale's Grave

Now that the tablet of eternity
is chiselled with your name, we come to pay
the tribute of our post-modernity
for all that we believe you had to say,

who hear you only faintly, filtered through
a gauze of echoes sounding in a voice
that may be counterfeit; and yet this noise
seems to expand our notion of the true.

A vanished face, a moment crazed with light,
mother-of-pearl that flashes in the night:
intimations of the miracle
when the null steps forward as the all -

these were signals, sparks that spattered from
the anvil of illusions where you learned
the music of a generation burned
...