The Last Roman Poet
As waves break over the beaches
and cannons boom beyond the city walls,
he asks for one fleeting, indulgent hour
in an inviolable place,
shielded by the muse’s wings and the sibyl’s words
like an actor gone backstage.
Forgetting the dream of a laurel-crowned head
and the couches that cradle the last Epicurean souls,
he longs only for adverbial quiet – not a sound –
in which all might be preserved, in the ambit of his art,
with the lightness of a quill passing over paper.
That each word, purified, rolling on the tongue
like a host, might have the authority of a garland
or royal seal
and press the world he knew into a hedge
as everything degenerates and collapses around him.
In this work of falconry applied to time past,
writing reminds him of the notches the prisoner
cuts in the wall of his cell to count the days,
knowing what will come: the slipknot of the gallows
or a shot fired straight into his brain.
Aware that all his work will now suffer
dispersion,
he wants to save, consoling and sufficient,
a word on the face of a future stele.
Lêdo Ivo (1924- ; trans. Alexis Levitin)
The Dream of Fishes
I cannot accept that dreams
are the privilege of human beings alone.
Fish also dream.
In the swampy pond, amongst miasmas
aspiring to the thickened dignity of life,
they dream with eyes always open.
Fish dream motionless, in the bliss
of fetid water. They aren’t like men, who toss
and turn in their unhappy beds. In truth,
fish are different from us, who have not yet learned to dream,
and we struggle, as if drowning, in turbid water
among hideous images and the bones of long-dead fish.
Beside the pond I ordered to be hollowed out,
making a troublesome dream of childhood come true,
I question the dark water. The tilapias hide
from my suspicious owner’s gaze
and refuse to teach me how I ought to dream.
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