And it grows, the vain
summer,
even for us with our
bright green sins:

behold the dry guest,
the wind,
as it stirs up quarrels
among magnolia boughs

and plays its serene
tune on
the prows of all the leaves –
and then is gone,

leaving the leaves
still there,
the tree still green, but breaking
the heart of the air.

One spring day I saw
the shadow of a strawberry tree
lying on the moor
like a shy lamb asleep.

Its heart was far away,
suspended in the sky,
brown in a brown veil,
in the sun’s eye.

The shadow played in the wind,
moving there alone
to make the tree content.
Here and there it shone.

It knew no pain, no haste,
wanting only to feel morning,
then noon, then the slow-paced
journey of evening.

Among all the shadows always
joining eternal shadow,
shrouding the earth in falseness,
I loved this steady shadow.

And thus, at times, it descends
among us, this meek semblance,
and lies down, as if drained,
in grass and in patience.

Brock’s first book of poetry, “Weighing Light”, appeared in late 2005. His poems have appeared in journals including Poetry, Paris Review, and Hudson Review. He was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford from 2002–2004 and a Cullman Center Fellow at the New York Public Library during the 2010–2011 academic year. Brock is currently working on a second collection of poems and editing “The FSG Book of 20th-century Italian Poetry”. He teaches at The University of Arkansas Programs in Creative Writing and Translation in Fayetteville, where he lives with his wife, the writer Padma Viswanathan, and their children, Ravi and Mira. (Courtesy of the translator.)

www.geoffreybrock.com

Carlo Betocchi is featured in Edition: Small Wonder