WET almond-trees, in the
rain,
Like iron
sticking grimly out of earth;
Black almond trunks, in the rain,
Like iron implements twisted,
hideous, out of the earth,
Out of the deep, soft fledge of Sicilian
winter-green,
Earth-grass uneatable,
Almond trunks curving blackly, iron-dark,
climbing the
slopes.
Almond-tree, beneath the terrace
rail,
Black, rusted,
iron trunk,
You have
welded your thin stems finer,
Like steel, like sensitive steel in the
air,
Grey, lavender,
sensitive steel, curving thinly and brittly up
in a parabola.
What are you doing in the December
rain?
Have you a
strange electric sensitiveness in your steel tips?
Do you feel the air for
electric influences
Like some strange magnetic apparatus?
Do you take in messages, in some strange
code,
From heaven’s
wolfish, wandering electricity, that prowls so
constantly round Etna?
Do you take the whisper of sulphur from the
air?
Do you hear the
chemical accents of the sun?
Do you telephone the roar of the waters over the
earth?
And from all
this, do you make calculations?
Sicily, December’s Sicily in a mass
of rain
With iron
branching blackly, rusted like old, twisted
implements
And
brandishing and stooping over earth’s wintry fledge,
climbing the slopes
Of uneatable soft green!
Taormina.