Flow

By Jonathan Galassi b. 1949 Jonathan Galassi

Down the path between the apples

through the maple grove of suicides

then left at the old wall

along the wire fence to the brook-

bank where narcissus noses

into skunk cabbage and hepatica:

Call me Apollo, crashing in the underbrush

with my arrows, my bow saw and clippers

out for your flash of white tail and alert

to hack me a path to your lair, to your cult’s den,

crisscrossing the water with Phoebe again and again

as it elbows below us and runs

for the creek racks

strongest in springtime when everything’s liquid,

tightroping over the rocks

in the plashing braid, hot on your sharp

scent and battling the mayflies

the black flies horseflies mosquitoes

there under the raspberry brambles and getting no nearer . . .

Or am I fleeing your coiling uncoiling

tentacular embrace

battered and scarred, am I seeing

your fabled face in the oily pools,

are these fern hairs sprouting at your knuckles

branchbones, little leaves halving

our limbs with leaves—are they yours or mine?

Your bloodhounds bay at the copper

creek, your velvet cape’s aloft

in the chiaroscuro breeze, you’re near, nearer,

hieing, heying, I’m falling, failing,

gashed, gutted, kneed-up,

muddy and galled—call me

Actaeon....

Source: North Street and Other Poems (HarperCollins Publishers Inc, 2000 2001)

Biography

In addition to publishing two volumes of poetry, Morning Run (1998) and North Street (2000), Jonathan Galassi is an eminent translator of Italian poetry. He has spent over 25 years studying Eugenio Montale’s poetry and has published several collections of Montale’s work, including Eugenio Montale: The Second Life of Art: Selected Essays (1982) and Collected Poems 1920–1954 (1998). Reviewing Collected Poems for the New York . . .

Continue reading this biography