Clive Watkins

Earrings

…due vite non contano… Eugenio Montale

What did you wear then – your glittering moon-discs,

     sun-discs, stars, fretwork of copper or gold,

bright turquoise beads, coral studs, or the pendent

     black tears fashioned from a piano-key–

when you walked out into the twilight garden?

     Somewhere beyond its girdle of stone walls,

its tall fence of trees, its encircling mountains,

     the ferocious ceremonies of death

go roaring on, whose crazed celebrants know that

     no life counts, not even theirs. In the house

the lights were lit. Riffles of laughter flickered

     in the evening air, while, from the dark

of the wood at the garden-end, came furtive

     shifts and homely flutterings; and the late

sun quickened with fire the neat silver roundels

     in your pierced ears: their agates gleamed like eyes.

Epigraph: from “Gli orecchini”, composed in 1940 and included in Eugenio Montale’s third collection, La bufera e altro (1956)

Clive Watkins’s recent collections are Already the Flames (Waywiser, 2014), a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year, and Pedic’s Dream (Common End Press, 2021). He won the 2018 Robert Graves Poetry Prize and was a prizewinner in the 2022 John Dryden Translation Competition for versions from Eugenio Montale. His critical writings encompass poets as diverse as Conrad Aiken, Wallace Stevens, Eugenio Montale, Robert Mezey, and Michael Longley. He lives in Yorkshire, UK.