Poem for Friday

The Starlings
By Jesper Svenbro
Translated by John Matthias and Lars-Hakan Svensson

Late one afternoon in October
I hear them for the first time:
loud-voiced palavering, whistles, murmurs,
quarrels, bickering and warbling, croaking and chatter
in the high plane trees of the street.
The leaves are all turning yellow this time of year,
causing huge yellow sunlit rooms
to appear at the level of the fifth and sixth floors
opposite the barracks, where the tram turns off
from the Via delle Milizie.
Solid branches, twigs, and perches:
every bit of space is taken up in this parliament of starlings!
They are tightly bunched together there among the leaves;
and the hundreds of thousands of starlings
that perform their flying exercises
against the backdrop of the evening's mass of motionless cloud
will surely soon have lost their places:
there are myriads of swarming punctuation marks out there,
starlings flying in formation,
sudden sharp turns, steep ascents,
swarm on delightful swarm
against a rosy cloud bank in the east.
The October evening is cool.
The shop windows of the Via Ottaviano are shining.
And the starlings are chattering, quarreling and laughing,
whispering and quietly enjoying themselves, when suddenly
a blustering as of ten thousand pairs of sharp-edged scissors
passes through the republic of the plains--
it is as though an alarm had sounded,
heard as an echo over the muffled traffic.
Soon the darkness of night will fall.
But the starlings up there won't stop talking,
they move together, push one another, chatter and flit.
Virgil must have had them in mind when somewhere he likens
the souls of the deceased to flights of birds
which toward sundown
abandon the mountains and gather in high trees.
I seem to be standing in an Underworld
in the midst of a swarm of birds.
The block is Virgilian; the street is crossed
by the Viale Giulio Cesare,
where you lived
for some time before you died.
That's why I am stopping here.
The souls of the dead have gathered in the trees.
Their number is incredible, suddenly it seems ghastly;
is this what it will be like?
For a moment I am a prisoner
of the poem I am writing.
There must be an exit.
The soldier coming up to me
has noticed that I have been standing
for quite some time looking up into the foliage--
into the darkness of feathers, bird's eyes, and beaks.
The peasant boy inside him apprises me
of the fact that starlings come in vast migrations
"from Poland and Russia"
to spend the winter in the south:
"And things go very well for them!
In the daytime they fly out to the countryside
and spend the night in here,"
he explains with great amusement, turning his gaze
up toward the swarm of birds. Their anxiety seems to have ceased;
in just a moment they all seem to have fallen asleep.
Only single chirps and clucks are heard
from starlings talking in their sleep.
What are they dreaming of?
Ten thousand starlings are dreaming in the darkness
about the sunlight over the fields.
As for myself, I am thinking of the tranquility
in certain restaurants in the countryside,
in the Albano Mountains and on the Campagna--
the tranquility at noon on a sunny day in October.
I am filled with the clarity of the fall day.
And am touched by something immeasurable, transparent,
which I cannot describe at first
but must be everything we never said to each other.
There are so many things I'd like to say.
How shall I be able to speak?
Today you are not shade, you are light.
And in the poem I am writing you will be my guest.
We are going to talk about Digenís Akrítas,
the Byzantine heroic poem
with the strangely compelling rhythm;
and since the manuscript of the poem
is preserved in the monastery at Grottaferrata
I shall order wine from Grottaferrata,
golden and shimmering in its carafe;
we shall talk about the miraculously translucent autumn poem by Petronius
which appears first in Ekelöf's Elective Affinities;
and about Ekelöf's poems, to which you devoted such attention.
Did Ekelöf ever come to Grottaferrata?
I seem to detect your lively gaze.
And we shall see how the starlings come flying
across the fields in teeming swarms.
They will come from Rome and spend the day out here
where they will eat snails, worms, and seeds
and suddenly they will fly up from a field
as at a given signal
and make us look into the sun.

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Relatively quiet day yesterday interrupted by utter panic for twenty minutes during which I thought I had forgotten that my older son had switched Hebrew classes from Tuesday to Thursday, as I clearly had not taken him to Hebrew school after unexpectedly driving home an extra boy in the carpool. I rushed him around, made us both crazy, then remembered that it was Simchat Torah and there was no Hebrew school. Younger son did have violin and all this rushing unfolded while was trying to get him ready for that. I should have remembered that it was Simchat Torah anyway, as and I were discussing Jewish holidays when we had lunch, noting local sukkahs in front of neighbors' houses and along nearby streets. She and I had Mexican and sat around chatting about pop culture.

I did not get to see , unfortunately, as she was ill! (If you're better by the time you read this, K, my Friday is still clear if yours is.) Tomorrow night Enterprise returns for the season and my marathon reviewing evenings start up again. I am actually quite glad that it's on a weekend, when I can watch with both kids and get their input (their Smallville commentary has been very enlightening thus far -- and I see that UPN's replacement for Enterprise has kept Superman in last place on Wednesdays). Thursday evenings have become the night when, after violin, younger son must be drilled repeatedly on his spelling words for the Friday test, and older son was doing computer research, so there was much family studiousness today too.

I know I had Deep Thoughts earlier in the day but am too fried to remember them now. Snape is being very slightly more cooperative now and I read a very entertaining section of The Commodore today in which Jack and Stephen both went on at length about how they don't see what's wrong with sodomy unless you do it with your own sailors and ruin your ship's discipline. That same argument applies to sex between members of the opposite sex in military chains of command today, so the objection isn't to love between members of the same sex at all. I love O'Brian.

My father took this photo on a cruise at sunrise a couple of years ago. It makes me feel both calm and hopeful.