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POETRY By: David Citino, Dana Gioia, Michael LaBruno, Al Montesi, and Rose
Romano THE DEATH OF VALENTINO Valentino refused to swoon for Il
Duce, and instead took out papers for U. S. Citizenship. Mussolini scowled his bambino
pout, the great chin taking aim at the Roman circus crowd. Eyes Ethiopia-dark, he strutted his balcony, a buffone
commanding all fans of Italia to boycott the Sheik. In theaters the world over shots were fired, holes in newsreel and feature, strongman and star, knives, fists flashing in the aisles during scenes of breathy passion. The heart beats danger out of the projected image, our dark, the power to shout, Camera!
Action!, we wish, and thrill to violins, dire climax, ache for the world this one can’t mean. Yet it’s how we choose to stage our dead that gets us close to the truth about a life. At Valentino’s funeral— hordes of veiled women weak-kneed on New York streets— the fascisti
tried to place an honor guard around the bier, alive with ten thousand flowers, but the grievers, immune to solutions too beastly simple, fought, chasing them off. And as everyone knows, Mussolini was hoisted to swing by his heels before the spitting crowd, a bloated parade balloon. Of all heroes, only lovers last, too grand to be bound by the twine of tiny ideas, the rusted wire of fear. EARLY SUMMER, VIA AURELIA In Rome, I sense a catholic sadness that rains on every procession, prick of guilt at the tiniest pleasure, doubts as difficult to pin down as motes floating across the eye, persistence of distant crickets, teenagers revving motorscooters through a city’s gridlocked vistas. What I’d give to be free as these two, she licking his ear as he plows the Vespa through storms of Roman traffic. Giovanni and Maria, let’s call them. Seventeen, maybe. Hands under shirts sculpt gooseflesh near Bernini’s stone in the Piazza Navona on Friday night, Sunday kisses tonguing sweet mists of Tivoli’s thousand wanton fountains. Even on the asphalt seas outside San Pietro, the Pope’s amplified blessing in sixteen languages raining on them as he bumps her rhythmically from behind, her eyes closed, thinking the Irish nuns standing nearby don’t see him reach around to madden the chafed, pink nipple. they stroll the Foro Romano, monuments to eternities of bureaucracy and sword lying broken and moldy, Coke cans, rubbers left by other night couples. Maria, laughing, mounts the Vespa behind Giovanni, clutches him with her knees, smiling Madonna-like, as if she held all empire and liturgy between her fair legs. They roar in fumes toward plummeting sun, hair and clothing whipping wildly, youth a lust to be in motion, a dream to exceed this parking lot of art. Tourist, semi-official voyeur, I can only wonder what Maria whispered with swollen lips and tongue-tip soft enough to make his back arch, and what litany he kept murmuring at her pulsing, proffered throat. There was too much between us, time and place, bursts of static. They’re gone, and at last I understand my inability to hear. What kept me from their songs were the cries of the millions killed to make this place, slaves who call to me now over shards of power, wretches poor as urban dirt who bore on their backs obscene weight of Legion, Emperor, Duke and Pope. Amid these neighborhoods of the stone all passion hardens to—palace, basilica, gallery—I can only ask Whose fault, all this
beauty?,
and tell the wind, I’m sorry. PLANTING
A SEQUOIA All
afternoon my brothers and I have worked in the orchard, Digging
this hole, laying you into it, carefully packing the soil. Rain
blackened the horizon, but cold winds kept it over the Pacific, And
the sky above us stayed the dull grey Of
an old year coming to an end. In
Sicily a new father plants a tree to celebrate his first son’s birth— An
olive or a fig tree—a sign that the earth has one more life to bear. I
would have done the same, proudly laying new stock into my father’s orchard, A
green sapling rising among the twisted apple boughs, A
promise of new fruit in other autumns. But
today we kneel in the cold planting you, our native giant, Defying
the practical custom of our fathers, Wrapping
in your roots a lock of hair, a piece of an infant’s birth cord, All
that remains above earth of a first-born son, A
few stray atoms brought back to the elements. We
will give you what we can — our labor and our soil, Water
drawn from the earth when the skies fail, Nights
scented with the ocean fog, days softened by the scatter of bees. We
plant you in the corner of the grove, bathed in western light, A
slender shoot against the sunset. And
when our family is no more, all of his unborn brothers dead, Every
niece and nephew scattered, the house torn down, His
mother’s beauty ashes in the air, I
want you to stand among strangers, all young and ephemeral to you, Silently
keeping the secret of your birth. The Little Kid Who
Deserved Better (An Autobiography) The fog rolled in, settling heavy, a rusted cauldron, over iron and concrete monster’s pain. Through my cell window the slit’s night was moist and vapor formed, thin cloud, covering super-reinforced-glass. A soon to be easel, contending with this, once, blank— white paper’s past. Having slept, all of a dreary day, I closed, untired, eyes. Reopening them abruptly, nettled persistence, to answer conscience’s knocking door, and admit The Little Kid out to play, once more, who reigns, subconscious, sheltered inside me; my vessel’s shell, his haven, shielding the brain from rain. He’s amazing and knew everything. He began to draw a house where I, once, lived on bogus-glass’, canvassed dew. Added the mailbox, and cast-iron fence protecting a rose-bush in my, environ’s, Jersey City, past. He traced two haunched lions, guarding an entrance hall stair that led to a door bell, not facing but, under the, black-oblong-ovate, letter stall, there. Then for finish, the welcome mat. In touch up’s final gesture, on the receptacle, he printed, in Olde Englishe Formale Mr. and Mrs. Carmen La Bruno 235 Cambridge Avenue, with gold, decalled, Capitals, over raised, silver Roman Numerals. As it had been when life cruised, sane and well, love-float convoys, and wasn’t cursed, stark and bold, to fester, bruised in moats, most, abnormal hell. Lingering a moment, cramped on bended knees, he hurried, fingering a heart- shaped outline, around postal’s depository, designees. Cradle-weary he nodded, infant drunk, slinky-necked, to be caringly, carefully, buried away, gut-deep, snail to shell, inside of me for another lonely day. Acquiescent, I dried his finger with towel and care. Then, pat-warmed an armpit-cooled where droplets and rivulets, formed and pooled; soaking my thread-bare carpet’s thin shred, as they’d dripped down, my arm, instead, while he’d been drawing on and on. At last, exhausted, I fell into a restless, uneasy, senseless, slumber; yet a soul in fullest repose, arising, even, unable to remember, until bright sunshine’s clarity, one-eyed seer of all, Cyclopsed, concrete’s slit and, who’d suppose, all was erased except my ghostly prison number Or has 12 years here, bleeding, marqueed it On my brain. Quilt
Poems Pieces honoring the AIDS
dead, as their names appear on
the AIDS Quilt After Edgar Lee Masters’
Spoon River Anthology, after the Greek Anthology I. It is gut-churning this coming. Even as one chokes down— His neck twitching convulsively His voice bargaining with his innards to stay still. Now, he enters the long mile in the belly gym itself, where the long, rumpled quilt unfurls its gigantic silence. Images lurch helter-skelter through the old brain —pitting chiaroscuro design of brightness (once) against the present darkness. Is there more yet of
this to endure? Are both time and
biology, sitting like great scavenger birds, feteing on our brains
and guts. II. But, now, mid viscera
(storming), the nerves like acrobats swinging on a high wire, way stations suddenly
appear, rearing their buxom
whiteness —all fully staffed by
anonymous faces, determined to
watch—official and impersonal— in that vast chamber of
grief. Here, now and then,
scattered on tables pamphlets,
momentos, even photos of the quilt dead. and standing in
perpetual watch an emergency aid station with its large tanks of
oxygen starking there. III. The viscera quelled now,
the nerves mediated, the eye now quickens to
find the cherished names, sewn awkwardly to the
wrinkled cloth. the pupil, slit still
now, jumps apumping to a stitched
M_I_R_I_A_M. As an ice-star shatters
somewhere in the cosmos, the name of “Mariam of
the Sorrows,” “Mariam of the Snows,”
suddenly starks there. IV. Foremostly, Mariam loved snow and
ice falls. One images her still hurling all about her into snowballs pelting, shouting in a
frenzy of joy. In this high pitch of
gurgling and movement we stood sideways,
tilted by her joy. So much so, so often,
that we finally dubbed her “madonna of
the snow falls,” “Mariam of the snows.” Afterwards, Mariam, de-timed of her
adolescent halo, grown fat, a conventional
haus frau with a now dullish
husband and rebellious kids, kept protesting that she
was happily fulfilled and that her family were
all perfect. Yet she lost all to her
deserting husband and her street-wise kids. Fearing for their
welfare, she did drugs with them, until she too became
hooked on coke. We then lost touch with
her when she took to the street, recoverying her
afterwards when her AIDs related illness brought us together
again. We will not touch or
salute you, fair lady for certain acts have
their own unfitness... Rather let us raise our
fists at those who diced your life, whose throw is us as
well as you. V. Dino The next name we spot is Dino Dino with his law
degrees, his political savvy, his high sense of purpose. Since Stonewall and the
turning of the whole gay community from a
passive, feminine one to a fighting, political
and masculine one, he had fought for gay rights
and social justice. But Dino’s political
passion hid a deep hurt that no crusade or political
acclaim could dispel. It stemmed out of his
otherwise warm and loyal Italian family
refusing to accept him as he was. And so he would often
spit at fate and fortune, and when his
recklessness led him to HIV positive, he accepted it without
self-pity or whining and went willingly to
his death. Mutt Bitch It’s not easy being an angry poet when you come from a culture whose most profound statement of anger is silence. No one knows what you’re talking about. No one knows what your problem is. No one believes you. A poem needs a lot of explaining but refuses to do it itself. It expects the culture to back it up. If I have no culture I can say nothing; therefore, if I say nothing, I have no culture. I’m Neapolitan on my father’s side, Sicilian on my mother’s side. After my mother died, when I was eight years old, my mother’s people slowly faded away. I grew up in a Neapolitan family, always silently defending Sicilians. (Sicilians were my sainted mother.) If I misbehaved or did something stupid, it was because I’m Sicilian. I don’t remember ever doing anything that got me called Italian.
I grew up thinking Naples is in northern Italy. Sicilians don’t want me, either. The few words of Italian I know are all Neapolitan. I’m not serious enough.
I’m not oppressed enough. I haven’t been conquered enough.
I’m not Olive enough.
I may as well be Italian.
Don’t say Neapolitan—say Italian.
Remember the Renaissance. Remember how Italy saved Europe by inventing art and science.
(Don’t say Florence.)
But my guts— what do I do with my guts? Non-Italians don’t know what I’m talking about. They think I’m weird. They think the only difference, if there is any, between Italians and Sicilians, is that, unlike Italians (who aren’t too bright, either), Sicilians make pizza the way morons make wheels. So much for that problem Now, maybe I’ve had some inconveniences as an Italian, but if I changed my name, dropped the vowel, the barriers would fall with it. I’d have nothing to lose. If I ever felt lonely, I could go to the supermarket and fill my cart with cans of spaghetti and meatballs and no one would suspect a thing. Maybe it’s time to take inventory. I’m a women. I’m a contessa on my father’s side, contadina on my mother’s side. I’ve got a high school equivalency diploma and an associate’s degree in liberal arts. I’m a skilled blue collar worker. I’m a published poet. I’ve got a Brooklyn accent with Italian gestures. I’m a dyke. I’m a single working mother. All this stuff doesn’t add up to just one person. Fuck it. The Fly Giovanni de’ Medici, the first of the branch of the Medici family that produced Lorenzo who almost single-handedly produced the renaissance in Florence, advised his descendants— “Be as inconspicuous as possible.” This guy sounds like my father. The first 16 years of my life, I learned only two Neapolitan phrases— Assiettete and statte zitte. I’m standing now and I’m speaking. Lesbians are not womanly enough, not Madonna or puttana enough, to be recognized by the Italian- American community. Italians are not Olive enough, not light or dark enough, to be recognized by the American Lesbian community. I’m standing now and I’m speaking yet I am neither seen nor heard. I’m a Sicilian-Italian-American Lesbian, the scum of the scum of the scum, forgotten by those who scream in protest because they are forgotten, and I am neither seen nor heard. Sicilians tell their children— “A fly doesn’t enter a closed mouth.” I’m standing now and I’m telling the Sicilians, the Italians, and the Lesbians— You can’t spit a fly out of a closed mouth. |