Death and the earth.

Red earth, black earth - you come from the sea with its parched green, where ancient words are found, and the flush of labor, and geraniums among the stones . . . You don't know how much of the sea's memory and exhaustion you carry with you, rich as recollection, rich as the scorched countryside. You are its harsh and sweetest word, whose ancientness shows in the blood pressing up in your eyes. If you're young, it's as a fruit is memory and a season . . . Your breath is so at peace under the August sky; the olives of your gaze soften the sea. Living, you live again, without astonishment, sure as the ground, dark as the ground - olive-press of seasons and dreams, that in the moonlight discovers itself the most ancient of things - like your mother's hands, or he hollow of the brazier.

You are like a country that no one has ever named. You wait for nothing if not the word that would gush from the depths like a fruit between the boughs. Like a wind, it reaches you and the dry, twice-dead things that encumber you fly away. Ancient limbs, ancient words - you tremble in summer.

And you're other things: the high hill, the footpath of stones, the games played in the canebrake. You know the vineyard, how still it is, under the moon. You cannot speak in words.

There's another land, a quietness that isn't yours. Its silence spreads out over leaves, around low hills. There are fields in it, and waters. You are a secret silence that concedes nothing - the lips and eyes of darkness. The vine.

Your land waits and has no words. The days pass, one by one, under the burning sky. You pretended there were clouds. It's a poor land - your low forehead knows all that. That, too, goes into the wine.

You will find them again, the clouds and the canebrake, the voices like a shadow in moonlight. You will recover words beyond this brief life of games played after dark, beyond the childhood on fire. How sweet, then, to be still. To be just earth and vine. A burning silence consumes the plain like bonfires in the evening.

Your face sculpted from stone, your blood hard earth - you come from the sea. Like the sea you pick up, examine, then throw away everything. In your heart is silence, or choked-back words. Something too dark. For you, dawn is a silence.

Yet you're full of the voices of earth - the shock of a bucket far down a well, fire singing, the thud of an apple falling, the resigned words that linger echoing around thresholds, a child's first cry - the things that cannot pass away. As you can't change. Too dark.

You are the closed cantina with its earthen floor, that a small child entered once when he still went barefoot, and thinks about forever. You are the darkened chamber that rethinks itself forever, the ancient courtyard where dawn opens like a fan.

You don't know the hills where the blood was scattered. Everyone ran away. Everyone threw down his arms and his name. A woman watched us flee. Only one of us stopped with a clenched fist saw the empty sky dropped his head and died under the wall, in silence. Now there's a rag of blood, and his name. A woman waits for us in the hills.

The look in your eyes is made of salt and earth. One day it gelled from the sea. There were plants near, heat-lovers, brushing your flank: they carry an odor of you still. Agave, oleander. All that locked up in your eyes, Your veins, your breath are made of salt and earth.

The hot, small winds, the sparse shadows of July - all that locked up in you. You are the hoarse voice of the countryside, the cry of the hidden quail, the tepid warmth lingering in stones. The country is fatigue, the country is sadness. At nightfall the countryman's gesture falls silent. You are the great fatigue, and the night deep enough to give it peace.

You're secret as rock or grass or earth. You thrash about in yourself like the sea. The word doesn't exist that could possess you or hold you back. You absorb shocks and jolts like the earth, and change them into life, silence, caressing breath. You're full of thirst as the sea, as a fruit of the cliffside. You cannot speak in words; no one's word reaches you.

Each time, you'll come from the sea and speak with its hoarse voice. You'll have your secret eyes like moving water glimpsed through a blackberry-thicket, and your low forehead, like a low sky trailing clouds. Living, you'll live again, like some ancient, savage thing that the heart long ago knew and closed on, trembling.

Each time, something's wrenched away; each time there's death. We've been fighting forever. Whoever hurls himself on such a battle knows the taste of death and carries it in his blood. As good enemies no longer hate each other, we have one voice, one pain, and live facing each other under the same poor sky. Between us, no deceptions, nothing inessential - we'll be fighting forever.

We will fight again, we'll be fighting forever, because, side by side, we seek the sleep of death, and have the same hoarse voice, the low, savage forehead, and the same poor sky. We were made for this. If either of us surrendered, the long night that followed would not be peace, or truce, or a true death. You wouldn't be there. The arms argue with each other around an emptiness.

Until, again, that first slight trembling in the heart . . . They've given you a new name. Death can begin again. Something unknown and savage is born from the sea.

And we, the cowardly ones, who loved the running whisper of the evening, the houses, the footpaths by the river, the red dirty lights of such places, their softened restrained sadness - we tore our hands out of the living chain and were silent; but our hearts went on heaving with blood, and there was no more softness, no more abandoning ourselves to the path by the water - no longer slaves, we smelled of loneliness, of survival.

You are the earth and death. Your season is darkness and silence. Nothing is so remote from the dawn as you.

When you seem to wake up you go on being a sadness. It's in your eyes and your blood though you don't feel it. You live as a stone lives or the hard earth. You wear dreams motions tears thoughtless as clothing. Like lake water the sadness quivers and surrounds you. There are rings on the water. You let them vanish. You are the earth and death.

Cesare Pavese (1908-1950) is one of Italy's most important modern writers. These two sequences were written near the end of Pavese's life and published as a book by Einaudi.

Alan Williamson's next book of poems, Res Publica, will be published by the University of Chicago Press in 1998. He is Professor of English at the University of California, Davis.

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Author:	Pavese, Cesare
Publication:	The American Poetry Review
Date:	Sep 1, 1997
Words:	1186
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Topics:	Poetry