Now that the ticket to eternity <br />has your name on it, we are here to pay <br />the awkward tribute post-modernity <br />allows to those who think they think your way <br /> <br />but hear you only faintly, filtered through <br />a gauze of echoes, sounding in a voice <br />that could be counterfeit; and yet the noise <br />seems to expand our notion of the true. <br /> <br />An ivory forehead, landscape drunk on light, <br />mother-of-pearl that flashes in the night: <br />intimations of the miracle <br />when the null steps forward as the all— <br /> <br />these were signals, sparks that spattered from <br />the anvil of illusions where you learned <br />the music of a generation burned <br />by an old myth: the end that will not come. <br /> <br />There is no other myth. This sun-drenched yard <br />proves it, freighted with the waiting dead, <br />where votive plastic hyacinths relay <br />the promise of one more technicolor day <br /> <br />—the promise that is vouchsafed to you, scribe, <br />and your dictator, while your names get blurred <br />with all the others, like your hardest word <br />dissolving in the language of the tribe.<br /><br />Jonathan Galassi<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/montale-s-grave/
