Italian Stream

Alfred Kreymborg

Distinct reflections mark the hoarded caves
where water has embezzled mountain shapes,
and nestling there in eerie miniature
a city not unlike our city here:
through whose quaint, shivering streets,
(it’s colder there, you may not know)
the naked burghers of the deep,
who move in horizontals,
and weirder still, obliques,
whose eyes, staring wide,
attached to the sides,
not the front of the head,
see what they pass
but not whither they go,
who shoot in and out
or dive right straight through
our houses, as much as to claim:
“Your houses are open windows
and all windows hoops of fire
we circus horses disdain
either to see or consider”:
or, worse than this, shame
our city by feeling it air,
not there at all, but a thing
unworthy an effort of thought
which might disturb the refrain
of mouths that open and shut
to slow bubbled staves—
that they sing while they prance
you can judge by the waves!
And yet, in spite of all this
and much more I could add,
I actually beheld on a dav
like the present, as clear,
one of our species,
a man from our town,
sit down on a wharf,
and cast a long silly line
with its sillier hook
right into that stream—
as if to say, “Look,
it’s peopled with fish!”—
and not with the world
it truly and venerably is,
and that, I swear, is a dream!