Thread

By Jonathan Galassi b. 1949 Jonathan Galassi

Heartworn happiness, fine line that winds

among the tapestry’s old blacks and blues,

bright hair blazing in the theater,

red hair raving in the bar—as now

the little leaves shoot veils of gold

across the trees’ bones, shroud of spring,

ghost of summer, shadblow snow, blood-

russet spoor spilled prodigal on last year’s leaves . . .

When your yellows, greens, and yellow-greens,

your ochres and your umbers have evolved

nearly to hemlock blackness, cypress blackness,

when the woods are rife with soddenness

(unfolded ferns, skunk cabbage by the stream,

barberry by the trunks, and bitter

watercress inside the druid pool)

will your thin, still-glinting thread insist

to catch the eye in filigreed titrations

stitched along among beneath the branches,

in the branches where it lives all winter,

occulted fire, brief constant fleeting gold . . .

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 . . .

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