|
POETRY By: Rosemary Cappello,
Albert DeGenova, Lz Giammarco, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Daniela Gioseffi, Julia Lisella, Samuel Maio, Joseph Maviglia, Gianna Patriarca, and the great
depression The youngest in my family, I missed the golden times when my father had three shoemaker shops and drove a Bentley When the bank didn’t have the money for the checks he’d drawn he lost his properties It took him all his life to buy back the Llanerch shop and he never had a decent car again He gave up business for philosophy He built a bookcase At the central point, he carved a man’s head over an open book As he stocked the shelves, he told us “Learn.
What you store in your head can never be taken from you” Some who lost as much as he jumped out windows or re-amassed their
wealth He built a bookcase MY HOMETOWN —After hearing the song by Bruce Springsteen My father never said to me about the place where I was born and raised This is your hometown He spoke of his birthplace — his hometown so far away I couldn’t imagine it, yet I inherited that yearning My mother never said to me about the place where I was born and raised This is your hometown She spoke of her birthplace, the memories of her school, her church her foreign parents’ grocery store the neighborhood that’s gone to drugs that’s nobody’s hometown My parents chose a place to live planted themselves in Llanerch soil though my father couldn’t take winter planted themselves in Llanerch because he believed suburban air was best for us He lived a half century there, then died in Llanerch, never our hometown My Father’s
Trombone Piece by piece, my small hands resurrected golden tubing from its tattered case and carefully fit together the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. In the bell I could see myself turning red, drowning in the huge mouthpiece. I wanted desperately to play that wonderful horn. My father saw it in my careful hands and smiled. By my time he had a new profession. I saw him play it only once down in the basement— from the top of the stairs crouching, hiding as if I’d sneaked past an usher I heard his deep song. The song he never wanted me to hear, the song of dulling brass and
a mildewed case. Song For My
Son #1 Big
juicy on
the lips kiss. I
love you to your bones each
and every one to
your thumbs that
match mine exactly. #2 Gramma
died Still
remembering the
first-born daughter buried at three months Still
loving the
son who had forgotten her Still
guarding her
recipe for Easter calzone. Cole
says, “Nana
got in a crash and didn’t have her seat belt on.” Cole
asks, “Does
Nana make pizza for Jesus?” #3 “What
is a belly button for?” you
ask as you brush your teeth. Tonight
instead of a bedtime story we
look at a book of fetal photos unformed
thumbs poised before unformed lips, and
you want to know, know, know if
it hurts to cut the cord. I
say “No.” You
don’t believe me. #4 Precious
is Cole. No
gold, no souvenir, no
poem is Cole. No
gooey baby smile no
first-step photo is Cole. Precious
is! fear, that
nightmare fear of
the unforeseen. Precious
is the passionate piobia unreasonable,
incapable of
letting go Cole’s
Precious
hand. #5 “Mommy’s
bed is warmest Mommy’s
bed is best” “Don’t jump on me you
hurt my stomach” “Mommy’s bed is funnest Mommy’s
hugs are best” Mommy
and Cole morning
is your time the
longest time longer
than breast feeding, baths
in the sink, walks
with the stroller. Morning
is your intimate time the
shortening time Cole
too big to bounce on your stomach too
big to fit the small space between us. It
pains your stomach again he
grows beyond your space again. #6 Writers’
ghosts walk on Kerouac Street Beat
poems on beat up shelves City
Lights stands
unchanged (and not) on
the border between little Italy and Chinatown. Diane
di Prima loses her virginity again
and again as
I sip espresso with
her “Memoirs of a Beatnik.” I
feel their sour breath; the
writers’ ghosts of 1960 San Francisco are
wheezing, laughing, fucking, drinking while
I am here doing my duty marketing
communications for
the corporate god. A
saxophone calls me into Chinatown (wheezing
voice of the poets) And
the beats go on. Oh
spirits, we are kindred in
this dirty, old, beautiful, alive, dead city
with the bridge yet
I am
a conspicuous, lamenting conventioneer tourist, part-time
poet, part-time saxophonist, who chose
the path more travelled. Cole,
listen to the poets. Listen
. . . “to thine own self be true.” Listen
. . . “Blow, man, blow!” #7 We
sit on a fallen tree talking beside
a wooded road in rural Michigan waiting
for Mom to retrieve us from our hike. You
love hiking. In
a tangle of fallen branches you
found my walking stick, just right, and
yours (just right too) . . .
sticks we will use again. You
collected acorns found
deer tracks and a squirrel’s nest, and
tasted wild raspberries, ripe and so sweet. You
listened to woodpeckers the
rat-tat-tat-tat excited your imagination and
yes, that was like Woody, and
yes, you
can draw pictures of woodpeckers when we get home. And
yes, we
will always go hiking. Then
somehow our conversation moves to relationships (mother,
cousin, sister, son the
words intrigue you), and
to fathers and sons, and
to when I was a little boy, and
to Grandpa Al (whose
thumbs match ours, exactly) and
why don’t we see Grandpa Al? Because
. . . (searching
birch branches above for something to focus on) Because
. . . (looking
into your waiting eyes) Because
he and I never went hiking and
you seem to understand. American/italian
. . . woman Sadness of the night descends upon my inner
soul and burns within the generations of lights extinguished by dreams of a
new place and a new birth. I am my father’s daughter who is his
father’s son who is his mother’s son . . . and so it goes on and on
and the sadness which was not there in the beginning cries out to be heard
. . . take us back to where the sun shined and the mountains with
the crisp air of a new born day reached to endless skies of ancestors upon
ancestors . . . Take us back to where we were one with
the realms of sainthood, motherhood . . . of people who cried
and laughed with the spontaneity of much loved children. Somewhere in long-forgotten distances
voices stood still on the tail of the winds that blew to a distant shore,
that deposited the beloved sons and daughters . . . who like
orphans grappled for the breast of humanity recognizing a dark and endless
avenue of solidification. I am the daughter of the father of the
father of the mother who cries now as they cried then . . . a
never-ending sadness of a people torn from a place of love because of the
winds that promised those impalpable objects of life. Some went because of poverty
. . . some because of strife, long held family issues, never
resolved . . . some because of a system as all systems not meeting
the needs of those who wanting to blow the winds of change, fled for their
lives. The sadness continues for generations of
a people searching for the daughters of the fathers of the fathers of the
mothers who will return them to the coolness of the mountains and the blessing
of the snows. The breast of the adoptive winds held not
milk of love for the orphans who arrived on a land that welcomed with pails
of different paints that colored the children with everything but love
. . . The longing for the mother of the fathers
of the fathers of the daughters never ceases, generation unto generation
. . . The sadness
remains . . . generations in limbo . . . never to
rejoin the winds that blow still in the bosom of a world that none should
have left. but I always
got away My mother dreams that two
people, one a bald-headed man,
have grabbed her. They try to push her into
a small windowless room. They will never let her
out. “No! No!” she screams at
them, lifts up two baseball bats which miraculously appear
in her hands, and beats them on the
head, very hard, “but not enough to kill
them,” she assures us, “just enough to knock them
out.” “I escape,” she says, “and
leave them behind me on the floor,
their mouths open.” She demonstrates,
opening her mouth wide, the white line
around her lips clear, her face pale as white
flour. “You have three months, at
most, to live,” the doctor tells her, but
it is one month already, and she is beginning to
get up, beginning to hope. “I got away,” she laughs
and for a moment, we are drawn into her
belief. “I had the same dream three times, but I always
got away.” this
nectarine This
nectarine, shaped like a symmetrical apple, is cold and beautiful. I can
imagine a 19th-century painter choosing it as part of a brightly-colored
still life, its colors, autumn leaf red, burnt orange with wings of gold,
remind me in their smooth cool suprises of a blushing, lovely young girl, her
skin glowing with vibrant energy. The nectarine feels so solid and
self-contained in its perfection, caught as it is in this moment, the aroma
of its ripening flesh, tangy and sweet in the heavy August air. I think of
the nectarine as lovely; did I ever think of myself in that way? In
memory, I am walking with Barry, a boy in my college class, down Market
Street in Paterson. He is younger than the rest of us. Though we are both in
college; he is only 17 and has developed a violent and passionate crush on
me. Conventional and constricted by rules I imagine are written in stone, I
turn him down repeatedly. One
day, we are walking down Market, and he cries out, his voice deep and
trembling with emotion, “Your skin is so beautiful, you look like a rose!”
“Oh.” I say, “Oh don’t, I’m not,” wanting to say that my self-image does not
permit such compliments, wanting to deny his words for fear they are said in
mockery or jest. Instead, I look up at him, his eyes dark and intense: even I
cannot doubt that he believes me to be beautiful, my skin glowing and flushed
as the nectarine I hold now in my hand, 25 years later, both of us
irretrievably changed into the people we have become. Myself, I see in the
mirror, sinking toward middle age, all similarity to this flushed fruit gone.
And Barry, what does his mirror reveal? Has his skin lost its radiance, and
his eyes—do they still burn? thinking
about the intricate
pathways of the brain This shell,
this snail shell, still warm
from the sand, reminds me
of the Pueblos outside of
Colorado Springs, those cave houses carved out
of mountains of red sand with their
walkways circling up
the mountain. At the tip
from a small opening smoke curled
out and trailed a dark
smudge across that immense sky Even the
color along the shell’s ridges reminds me
of that deep ochre sand and the wind
blowing the dirt in circles,
the tumbleweed, like barbed
wire, that rolled and rolled
across dry earth. This shell
is smooth and cool in my hand,
smooth as the slide in the
playground at the Riverside Oval, the silver
surface slippery so that we
slid to the ground in a rush that took my
breath away. The inside
shell is reached through a
curved lip that forms a
laughing or sneering
mouth, and inside,
a small protected curve, and in the
deepest part of it,
shadows. I think if
you could travel into it deep enough,
if you could take that journey to the
center, you’d discover the witches
waiting with their
chants and runes but if we
gave them names, they’d be
able to escape like all the
fears of which we are ashamed and all the
memories that lie in the
rabbit warrens of the
brain, smooth or ridged, pathways
that lead to the
witches with their bags full of
the past. The self
that is still six years
old is afraid of heights and of the
older child pushing the
swing higher and the laughter
and terror caught in our
throats and the sky washed in
blue light moving, moving, our legs
reaching up toward leafy
trees and the perfect puffy clouds
of a July morning. you were
always escaping You were always escaping. We’d hear the sound of the brown door slamming, the rattle of the glass panes, and you would vanish. I see us standing in the Seventeenth
Street Kitchen, Mamma with her arm around us and her bruised eyes, her voice quivering, she’d say; “Can’t you stay home tonight?” But you were already moving away. She’d stand there for a moment, staring at the empty doorway, then, she’d sigh, lift her shoulders, and begin some project with us. She’d give us cookie cutters shaped like stars and bells, and we’d cut out sugar cookies, even Alex who was only three. We’d dye sugar red with food coloring and sprinkle it on top. The kitchen would fill with the sweet, warm aroma of our baking, and we were content. Other times, we’d make chocolate pudding or listen to Stella Dallas on the radio. Sometimes she’d lift Alessandro into her
lap, and Laura and I would perch on the arms of the old padded rocker and she’d tell
us stories about Santo
Mauro, the town where she grew up. Through the evening hours, she would
distract herself as well as us, but once we were in our
beds, her hunger for your presence would return and smear the contented
landscape. “You always choose your friends first,”
she hissed, her voice rising with anger, and you
would struggle from her grasp, rushing to the next
meeting, the evenings playing bocce at the Società, the spaghetti dinners, the women of the Ladies’ Auxiliary who flirted with you while Mamma stayed home. Mamma peered out of the edge of the green blackout shades, waited for your footsteps on the wooden porch. Even when you stayed home one evening, you were restless, pacing the floor as though the kitchen were a cage and we the bars that tried to hold you but that always failed. REVISIONS 1 Today driving down the
Turnpike toward the Arts Conference at Rutgers, I remember the boy I loved when I was 14, a boy whose name was Bob. In my mind, I called him
Robert. I remember he was tall and big
boned with an innate grace. I think it was his shoulders I loved the most. He did not know I existed. His family lived in the ramshackle brown house on 19th street next to Warner Piece Dye Works. They were
American so far back they could not
name their first ancestor, only
knew he had come from England some great-great grandfather
ago. Robert’s father had the broken-veined face of the chronic drinker; his mother was thin, almost emaciated. Both of them had blue eyes, faded to a light gray, hard as stone. 2 I would sit on our back porch drying my hair in the sun and waiting. He rode his bike into our
cracked cement yard, squealing to a stop with the
wheel facing the porch and me; he dropped the paper onto the step and rode away. We never spoke, though my eyes longed for him. 3 When my friends started having real boy friends, I made up stories of dates I had with him and told them to my friends on our party-line telephone. One day, when I went to the
butcher, he was there with his friends. he put his arm around me, “This is my girl,” he said. “We are going on a date.” Then he laughed. They all laughed. Suddenly, I knew he was on our party line, Shame, corrosive as acid, filled my mouth. 4 It is only today, with the October sun blazing, and a crisp Fall tang in the
air, that I realize, as though I were reading a message in a language I have just
learned, that to Bob I would have been not only too young to notice, too shy, but also too much a guinea. Suddenly, I wish I could hit him; I wish that he spent his whole
life in a factory making buttons, that his life is bleak and hopeless, that he drinks. I wish I could tell him that I don’t need him anymore; and that only in that one
small segment of time did he seem
perfect. 5 In my mind, I see him, a beer in his hand, his wife so much like his
mother they could be twins. His body’s gone soft with middle age, and he has
grown silent; he cannot find the
words to explain his life, all the
things that have pushed past him like a roller coaster. Sometimes he dreams that he is
speaking to his dead father, and
miraculously the words come to him to
explain, but when he wakes, he is
inarticulate and the words in his mouth
taste sour and bitter as bile. UNFINISHED
AUTOBIOGRAPHY I
was born in 1941. The
sky was falling. The chairs of state were
arranging themselves in “isms” of death. I
learned to speak by fingering an apple, rolling
its crimson shine around in baby fingers, because
my mother’s Slavic smile seemed to give
it onto the table of my highchair in
that Newark kitchen of new wintry mornings, bright
leaves at frosty windows just met for
the first time: autumn sun- light,
warm hands. “God bless Mommy! God
bless Daddy! God bless spaghetti!” I
chortled up to the big people around
my bedtime crib. When they laughed I
learned I had a pen for a tongue that
could please them. Meantime,
the bombs were falling, the
blitz began blitzing, Jewish, Polish flesh sizzled in
Hitler’s ovens, lampshades of human skin, gold
fillings pulled from dead mouths remade into wedding rings. Are
you wearing one? Has
your gold ring come from a mother’s mouth opened forever
in mortified howl filled with poison gas in
the stifling chamber where she bled menstrual
blood down her thighs bereft of clothes, crushing
her child to her crowded breasts. “Empathy”
is my favorite word. My
peasant mother—war orphaned, my
lame Italian immigrant father, “greenhorn
guinea” they called him. “Guinea gimp!” they
shouted as he sold newspapers for
the state “Education of the Poet” he
gave to me, raising me in the ghetto of Newark to
speak good English where
the worse that happened then was when a
boy named Herby chased me, cornering
me down the alley and
kissed me, sticking his tongue in my mouth, choking
me with mysterious sex as
the other kids laughed: “Herby
French-kissed Daniela!” A grand joke of
the neighborhood. Nothing much else happened until
I was abused by a Klansman in
a dark jail cell one midnight, Sheriff
of Montgomery County, the
only law for miles around Selma where I
integrated Deep South television as
a journalist announcing Freedom Rides and Sit-ins, not
out of bravery, but idealistic naivete. Somewhere
in between then and then, I
met a book full of rotting corpses, photos
of mutilated bodies on battlefields or
in concentration camps, dead
faces distorted by screams, dying
hearts impaled on bayonets, and
all my orgasms, ever since have
been screams of letting go of horrors —guilty
gaping skulls full
of gold filled teeth. I’m
a “Jersey girl” who grew up, half Polish war orphan, part
Jew, half Italian immigrant daughter
of a lame “guinea gimp,” who was a poet dying of
the word, “empathy,” he carried on his back and
taught me Shakespeare’s English. He
said I was too pretty for my own good and
read me Yeat’s poem to his daughter, but
now I’m fifty, menopausal, insomniac, and
don’t care much about looks. My greatest moment of
joy came in near death—not when I was jailed by
the Klansman Sheriff, but
when I gave birth to my daughter who came by
emergency Caesarean, bright
with hope, lovely girl, do
you feel the ambulance siren of guilt, grieving
in your near death birth, the rebirth of your mother and
your moment of almost not being new life greeting
me in your eyes, my eyes peering
back at me, questioning, after
the fever subdued. Here’s
your crimson apple of being, daughter, amidst
new wars and books always repeating themselves like
autumn where death turns to beauty in dying leaves singing
their windy sighs into
the lies of hypocritical histories of
hand on reborn hand by hand murdered and bleached to bones or
held warm or cold at fifty I can’t sleep well
anymore. I grow fat eating love, I remember thrills of
my childhood autumns when the maples sang with sparrows outside
fall windows and the kitchen was warm as apples turned
crimson in pale hands—color of blood simply being
before I found the book of corpses from
ovens, battlefields, the
ring of gold that broke in divorce from
your father whom I still love and
mourn. Now, I take you, daughter, to
the woods to meet the scarlet maples, feed
the wild deer, crush the
leaves and acorns with your steps, dance
in the moonlight, your
mother is no orphan, like
hers was, your father is not lame like
mine was, but
the Earth, Our Mother, and
all Her creatures swirl in clouds of gas garbage greed the
language of oppression: “nigger, pollack, guinea, mick, spick, kike, jap, cunt, prick.” The
White House of Washington confronts its manufactured Butcher of
Baghdad and “sand niggers” are
decried on Wall Street where the
banks collapse in graft and
a tenuous thread of life secretes onto the page thickens my
eyes become someone else’s. Are they yours? Daughter? I
collect a book on ethno-centricism, chemical, biological,
nuclear warfare
and hate the
rich nuclear and oil barons who are your enemy. We
cannot live without enemies, Freud said, and
my British psychologist friend, Dorothy Rowe, agrees
so. These oil,
nuclear, chemical, and germ warfare profiteers
hold us all hostage, you,
me, and
them, to
the screams of skulls with
their forever gold teeth,
lampshades of human skin, their
ears are ours filled
with a siren of guilt from
the history book of
corpses, daughter, poet.
It talks to autumn. It
says;”Empathize!” Because
we all die to
live and eat and see and
hold our crimson apple. It’s
beauty makes us sing. What My
Father Taught Me About Madison Avenue A place. Men in
beautiful Everything my
father said Our eyes could see College grads. My
father blue collar college grad America was anything Now I am a slave to travel guides. We
have left you kids Wherever I go Our July Dark summer, the house closed up like a cellar, cool a production of science—my father’s idea— one fan to pull cool air into the front
of the house, the other sucking hot air from the
bedroom into the world. Summer not a swelter of sun rays, but a darker fuming of tomatoes wrapped in
newspaper and basil roots dangling in juice
glasses. My parents’ idea of shelter: something to
do with just enough and beleaguering excess until it tires as much as July’s damp souls. They tried to teach
me to give up to what is stronger than me, to obey summer. But instead I bully the heat, try to reproduce the coolness of those first summers but forget to turn the blinds just so to scatter
sunlight. By 9 a.m. the apartment is tight with
heat and the whir of the fans, too small for
these prewar-building windows can’t protect anything. father death We die as we
dream: Alone. And so I was
alone With my
father The morning
he died In the hospital
room. It was just
after dawn, A crescendo
of light. The patient From the
other bed Was in the
bathroom With the
nurse. The running
water Woke me. For days my
father Had not
talked Or
recognized anyone. But now he
raised His head
slightly Off the pillow And looked
at me. I sat on the
edge Of his bed, Leaned
towards him. He said
something In Italian I didn’t
understand. He spoke out
of one side Of his mouth Slurring his
words Like he used
to when Making fun
of somebody He knew from
Morley. “Sollevami! Ascendente! Ascendente!” Then he
smiled, in peace. artist’s
model Seeing his pen and ink sketch
of her As the Sunday lingerie
advertisement the
afternoon pallor of rain in Fiesole the
yellow light, the room’s cold draft and
his not caring even to glance at me I
let fall the sheet from my shoulders and
offered to splay my legs for him however
uncomfortable in that off way they
all like and he always wanted and
I wantonly refused until then I
took his smudged hand along my thigh but
he was cross and would not answer She remembered clearly his
quick hands, The black and thick hair
covering them, His alighting fingers brushing
charcoal Into mild grace of her
becoming figure. when
he finished I was beautiful lines and
certain suggestion of empty shapes my
cheeks somewhat too high and sharp and
my brows arched and mouth downcast little
matters making me his substitute for
what he just lost and still desired of
another time and woman of that look so
he left undone my legs at the knees an
insignificant contour of the bodice I
parade in foddered background rising Above all else, his dark
Italian eyes, Seeming never to look where
they focus Or to see her beyond a scene’s
feature, Necessary for its completion
and life, As the wind, rain and light he
creates. father, it’s
time Father, it’s
time, time we
should talk: by evening
the sun disappears. You plan to retire
early this fall the sweat
and the heartache within these
four walls, the winters
of disoccupation. I remember
the laughter, card-games
through the night, the children all dancing
to old village songs. My mother’s
voice bringing a
tune to the spring, somehow her
songs lasted through all of our
fights, but her
songs could not soothe your frustration. And father I
know you’ve been crying and father
you seem so alone. I remember
grandmother dying and the land
that you grew in you’ve never
outgrown. The
poolhalls you played in you don’t
visit much. The highways you built
you don’t travel. Sun beating
muscle for months
at a time, hot dust-filled days and October
wine, the lambs
and chickens all slaughtered. And mother
has always been trying to make these
four walls more a home. And father
when you hear her sighing you just
want to get off that old
cement porch, just want to
get off that old cement porch and travel
the hillsides ’till morning. ’Cause an
old man’s country is a place
never lost, the old
village priest, the sign of the cross. Fishermen
working their nets after dark, marching
band music, parades in
the park, the butcher is always
closed Monday. And father I
see you’ve been crying and father
you seem so alone, but I remember,
it was your mother dying and a heart
that was singing sank like a
stone. And father
it’s time, time we should
talk ’cause the
sun’s turned its back on the
moon, dwells in a
country where winter bites hard, frosts up
the windows and covers the
yeards and the
butcher is open on Monday. Father, it’s
time, time we should talk. Joseph
Maviglia © 1989 Printed by
permission of STEELRAIL MUSIC 68 Montrose Avenue, Toronto, Canada M6J 2T7: 1989, 1990
CAPAC SOCAN. Released
on ATTIC RECORDS (ACD 1320) 1992 Compilation
CD The Gathering TARANTELLA
III I sing for you a
tarantella now a tarantella for your feet not for any meaning but for distance squeezed into a room of
women with bodies hard as steel men full of wines and
fruit. I give to you this
tarantella as it is meant to give not listen to against the lonely wall of
reason folding comfortably in the ears of a lonely century. This tarantella with the eyes of a child fighting his sister at the
end of the birthday table for
gifts lifts off the floor of a
shack in a country calling sun. This tarantella does not turn its face
from you but wants you to live on like your mother at your
birth. This tarantella hates
Columbus forgets its name at Ellis
Island lives in the hands of field
workers who pass it on to
bricklayers women working in factories men paving roads and their children. And if you hear it dance and if you see it sing for it is for you it comes
round twisting inside itself sweating across a wooden
floor taking your hand. cantatore We—and I mean especially us Italians— must regain a little of our barbarity, even our savagery, if we want to rediscover Poetry. —Giovanni Papini Oral poetry
is like an unwhispered word in
a country where
children run home
across fields play
by a river and
climb for the fruit of
the tallest of trees. Oral
poetry is
a song after death in
an un-nourished village caked
in the sun with
armies rumbling through. Oral
poetry is
a dance of two lovers
in
the high grass of meadows and
the singer at
a well or a fountain leaving
his heart for
a cool cup of water. Italian
Women these are the women who were born to give birth they breathe only left over air and speak only when deeper voices have fallen asleep i have seen them bleed in the dark hiding the stains inside them like sins apologizing i have seen them wrap their
souls around their children and serve their own hearts in a meal they never share. my birth my father is
a great martyr he has
forgiven me everything even my
female birth. January was
a bitch of a month when i
raised my head, for the first time from my
mother’s stained and aching womb a dozen relatives
waited in the kitchen to see the
prize in the easter egg how i
disappointed them my father’s
first child was not male i swear i
can still hear the only
welcoming sounds were from my
mother and she has
always been blamed for the
mistake for weeks my father
was drunk on red wine mourning the
loss of his own immortality mary I Mary jumped from stone
to stone small
islands shining in the
August sun she lost her
balance the water
kissed her knees I watched
her and loved
her the closest thing
to an Angel she came to
me smiled her
Angel smile our fingers
touching we walked
home. II well, little
sister it is the
second year of your new
state the woman the wife two years
since you dropped your
laughter in the music
box on the
dresser and walked
out, smiling in your
white dress with the
thousand pearls you left a
shadow in our bedroom that
never sleeps tonight I will stay
in another room. III our bodies
were foreign countries never to be
looked at never to be
touched never to be understood preserved in
plastic like
Teresa’s couch and chair like her giardiniera petrified in
vinegar to last
forever for some
great, sacred feast. Mary’s
breasts drip with acid milk she cannot
feed her child it will not
nourish it will not
fill. her eyes are
deep, dark question
marks she cannot
control the hormones going wild
inside her veins her tortured
cries. my arms
around her like a prayer to flush out
this devil we do not
understand our hands
bonded, like children I am here,
please heal. IV she believes
she’s going crazy but she
doesn’t know why exploring
the reasons with each
bead at her
fingertips. her life is
perfect she believes
in God and her
husband she adores
the children her home is
comfortable except she
hates the kitchen sitting by
the light of the porch staring into
the dim suburban stars the tears
find their way into her lap like large,
clear stones. perhaps
tomorrow she will smile the pills
will work tomorrow. V suburban
grass is perfect in a year my
new nephew will plant his
knees everywhere he will be
green like the
neighbourhood. suburban
flowers are neat and quiet,
they remind me of my
grandmother’s hands at the end. Mary sits in the tall,
brittle shade of her dried
flowers in her white
living room Van Gogh
colours in her eyes. I visit
often to hold my
new nephew and to
reminisce of the days
when we were nieces and all the
living rooms were open
spaces. for grandma,
in bed, waiting your eyes
are the wrong colour there is no
darkness in them to write
about and pain is
always dark your smile
comes too easily pain never
smiles your face
contradicts everything yet, I know
your heart is bruised how can
ninety-one years not have bruised your tiny,
fading body that gave
eight children to this world and scattered
thirty grandchildren like wild
flowers in foreign cities. you have
come to end your journey uncomplaining in this
suburban bungalow in a room
with one window. you don’t
always recognize me but there is
something between us there is the
touch of my fingers on your perfect
hand I come to
sit by your bed not in duty but in need
of the stories that flow
from you I am in awe,
I listen you take me
to your century I will miss
this journey when you are
gone. Air Raid
Drills 1962. Twice a week a
buzzer blasted my first grade classroom
at Number 37 School in Rochester, New York. This
wasn’t the fire drill bell that
sent us into the cloakroom and out under the elm dying near
home plate on the dirt diamond. Miss
Richter sprang up from the chair behind her gray metal desk. Sometimes,
she told the class to duck and
cover, sometimes to single file row by row out to the lockers in
the hall, our index fingers pressed
to our lips, reminding us we needed to keep quiet. Crouching
like an all-star catcher under
my lift-top desk, I felt safe—hard-backed, thick and heavy school books
and blue-lined paper tablets, fat
black pencils and 64 crayons to shield me. I pound my fist into
my left hand, when my friend Vince
was watching, as if I were waiting for a fastball to blow towards
me. When Miss Richter ordered our
class into the hallway, we always started with the “A”s— the
row closest to the door, and
I waited by the huge windows for the alphabet to wind down to
reach me—“V” for Vallone, a name my
mother told me meant “brave man” in Italian. The whole school, grades K
through 6, lined the hallway walls, facing
the olive green lockers numbered with tags like cages at the
pound. Nobody
else cared where they stood, but
I elbowed my way to 11. I knew it was lucky for me because
of my name’s double “L”s. Miss
Richter told our class: “Put your left hands, palms down, against the locker in
front of you. Spread your fingers. Lean
your foreheads against the backs of your left hands. Clamp your right
hands around
the backs of your necks, and stay
that way until the chime sounds or I say to move.” I swallowed my
laughter with my friend Vince, one half of
the Italian twins who lived the next block down from my house on
Congress Avenue. Together, we
imagined soldiers finding our foreheads and necks in the halls, the
only parts of us saved in
the school’s wreckage. Nights, watching the Five O’Clock News on 13, my
mother looked more tired than
the factory made her before. I heard the words “guerrillas” and “fatigues,”
so I imagined apes in
tired clothes. I heard the enemy wanted bombers and missiles to zero in
on American targets— important
places, I thought, like Schiff’s Bike Shop, and the White
Star Grocery
Store where my Uncle Tony
worked as a butcher, and the room where I kept my baseball stuff and
toys. Once, when everyone stood in
the school’s hallway, some kid from the third grade classes began to
cry. Kids in each direction picked
it up and carried it along until it seemed like everyone in
the school was crying. Vince and I did,
too. (For what, we didn’t know.) Mr. Lee, the janitor, pushed his
dustmop toward the boiler room. Lunch
ladies waved gigantic aluminum spoons. The nurse went for a wet washcloth to
wipe the principal’s bald head. Miss
Richter ran to our room, past the construction paper flags of
all nations our class made for
geography and social studies, her red high heels clattering on
the lineoleum tile like
machine gun fire. In her tight skirt she moved as if she were wounded or lame. When
she came out to help wipe up the
aftermath, she held a box of tissues under one arm, waving
some in her other hand over
her head like a white flag of surrender. Vince and I swore we’d
wait after school for the new kid, Paco,
who just moved to the neighborhood from some island. We’d load our pockets with
rocks and chase him back there— no
matter where that island was. |