Natura Morta By Giorgio Morandi
For Saul
This moving world, alive before our eyes
Like a bold narrative of its own life,
Assumes a point of view where nothing dies.
October trees in drizzle, taxis stopping
Before the bright banners of the galleries
Where tourists pause a moment with their shopping.
But inside nothing stops, or starts, or pauses.
The paintings reach in stillness for the hand
That put them there, locked in their first causes.
Flagons, bottles, boxes, cups: a frieze
As close as may be to that purity
Which has no restless consequence to please.
And you, Morandi, in a bleak elation
Of the abstracted spirit, calmly propose
Your metaphysics of refiguration.
“Only we can know a cup’s a cup,”
You say. But so we do. And what is left,
However bitter, we must drink it up.
Again and again your shapes assume their places,
As if familiarity could help
Us to convert their nature into stasis.
Think of the Dutch, who valued appetite.
A carp or tulip was the thing itself,
Albeit conjured by their tricks of light.
Their world’s unarguably one we know,
The garden where our contemplation blooms,
The kitchen borrowed by the studio.
Their sensuous uses occupy our thoughts.
In the midnight foyer of the Dream Hotel,
Fish that seem dead are simply out of sorts.
If nature must be dead, as nature will
And all too soon, then let us not despair.
Still we are poets of life, and keeping still.
Page(s) 82-83
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