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POETRY By: Mary Cappello, Vincent Casaregola, Grace Cavalieri, Susana Cavallo, David Citino, Maryfrances Cusumano
Wagner, Joseph M. Ditta, Carmine Esposito, Steven Frattali, Jennifer Lagier, Diane Raptosh, Mary Russo Demetrick, Laura Anna Stortoni, and Diane di Prima CROSSWORDS Dear Anthony, big brother, how have you come to grow so small? Your letters wait for me, receive me at the day’s vanishing point, there in my rearview mirror, the flailing of arms in a flash soon swallowed by the torquing forward of
highways until you are gone again and all you have taught me forgotten by me because a part of me: my brother, the mathematical genius,
nicknamed “Yolk,” short for egghead, told me the mystery of
one divided by zero, sketched my lazy unmathematical
self into sine-waves and ellipses so that I might
understand the lure of line, its relation to time
and body, later, what enabled me to dance my brother, is this all I knew of you? and why did I never think to ask what
roads you were building in the long secrecies
of your room? While another brother was making his
model planes and trains, his go-carts and rockets, when he was catching tadpoles, or locusts
emerging from their shells, or the music of YES transcribed to the
strings of his mint-blue guitar, what heartbeat made your hands move? what objects told the trapezoidal length
of your days to a close? when were your tears? Anthony, with your unmatched socks, my changeling brother, I know you are afraid
to fit just as I am afraid to enter the space,
the vacant place in my pretended whole where I lost track
of you: Dear Mary: Since I have quit my job with the pump
company I take walks in the morning to get the
wheels rolling It gives me a chance to check the weather
without turning the radio on I am in the process of repairing my clock
for the second time since it fell again and I
can’t set it I stopped driving my car because I don’t
have insurance I rebuilt my bicycle from some parts that
Dad had left laying around in the garage but I
only have front brakes Dear Mary: It’s a warm summer’s day in the middle of
spring Arlo Guthrie is playing at the tower
theatre and I’m applying for a job as a driving
instructor Dear Mary: I failed the tests for driver training
instructor and have finally received my permits
for a second chance This time Mr. Barnes gave me the AAA book
entitled HOW TO DRIVE The book is well-illustrated and laid out
much better than the Penna. driver instruction
manual Dear Mary: I took a walk down to the waterfall behind the EL tracks the sights and sounds seem to give the
feeling of listening to musicians giving a live
performance Today Someone who calls me ‘the mystery
man’ told me that nothing seems to bother
me. I think that this is untrue Dear Mary: Presently I am unemployed when I am working I make a point to do my
best Dear Mary: Do parallel lines really meet at
infinity? Dear Anthony, Have I ever told you that your letters remind me of some of grandfather’s
journals? Perhaps because they feel of either you
or he playing that Segovia solo under the peach
trees at the side of the house oh, to return to those times— when the gravel driveway felt like the
bottom of so many lakes; then the day’s waters never reached
further than our ankles and we could crouch for our favorite
colored stone, polish it, affix a latin nickname to its
grain, we could chart, we could gather, the
universe then, laughter was our multi-colored
boat, now, the rock we fasten ourselves to Dear Anthony, I am afraid I’ve romanticized your
letters. Dear Anthony, Why the hell can’t you hold a job? Dear Anthony, Parallel lines, like parallel lives,
never meet, but I think of you on long journeys home, one eye on my rearview mirror, one eye on
the road, bracing myself for infinity. Reservoir of
Fists I
was taught three
things told the story of the poem and
only these: an
urge shaped like god, the
desire for narrative seizure, a more than common insight— that
seventh sense. What
could I call this then that
came from nothing so grand, but
a fear of my own imagination, a
desire to deny the past, a willed blindness? This
Christmas, childhood friends force
a remembrance: Patty
does all of the talking and most of the drinking; Julie,
afraid to be alone, is glad we’re together again; I
imagine making poems out of Patty’s stories between
sampling the rancid batters of
several different households’ Christmas cheer. I
force pen across paper in an age of electronic imaging, as
if to say, here’s a simple art, hard and common, as
darning a sock to hang from the doorknob— no
mantles in the lexicon here. It’s
Christmas— the
words click open and shut, their
subjects snapped, shot, taken. Patty
wanted to reminisce about
the number of our friends who’d died on drugs compared
to the number who were just the living dead: Reggie
o.d.’d the night his wife gave birth— Lisa
was doing hard stuff in the Poconos, Mickie
had turned to fundamentalism on his last time down, Jackie
was a wasted piece of shit; she
was up to the tenth row home, her tenth finger, when
I remembered . . . picking
burrs off our jeans, shaking
the goldenrod out of our pantscuffs after
having run through the brush behind the
Catholic hospital nearest
plot of ground closest
green to a park just
short of the creek— on
the banks of which in
winter we brought make-shift sleds and pummelled each other into delirium. on
the banks of which in summer a
nun stopped my mother from writing her life because
housewives near the edge of the creek must
mean suicide it
was a contemplative aproned look the sister couldn’t scan without
wanting to save “I
thought that pen and paper might be your suicide note, honey,” the
poetic moment, needless to say, was
lost—and the sister’s poor neighborhood mission was just what my mother
needed to
drive her back in doors to
remind her, once home, of just how often she had, sobbing
at the edge of the kitchen sink, considered
the act of
swallowing the wholegoddamned reservoir of fists pried
loose from bodies Patty’s
mother used to pray: “Help
me dear Lord to find what
I need to get me through the day” her
ill-lit kitchen aglow with the amber of
whiskey on smoked ice or
what I remember . . . sitting
in the dark comforted by the
hospital’s flashing yellow light— as
if to say something was alive in the world that
wasn’t stalked It
could take a life-time to die that way— this
is what Patty had come to tell me Christmas,
twenty years later, twenty
years since we took jobs cleaning toilets at
the hospital before the creek on
a bet that we wouldn’t last more than a week. Outside
a wrought iron sign read: Darby,
named for a town in England, founded
by Quakers, l786 didn’t
say current
population poor African, Irish, Italian Inside
hospital TV sets scientists
tell how the body begins as a single cell, nobel
laureate physicists compel: “There
must be something there that we can’t see that complicates the world” Patty
has moved up from toilets to the operating room: where
she cleans up after what I can’t imagine it’s
Christmas and in telling me about her work she
forces a laugh, a funny story about
a long-term desperate feeling in her gut that
prompted the doctor to take a fuller look: to
enter with S-curve, the sigmoid, the
scope into her rectum— so
here I am breathing, “oh, dear God,” she says, when
I hear the pattering of many feet, I
hear the doctor open the door, “I
knew these guys! It was all the
assistants and interns I knew from OR!” There
are certain subjects a poem cannot own and
rape is one of them stories
of daily practice: my friend Patty stripped
of her hospital cleaning women’s uniform, squatting
on all fours, wishing
her body were porous and permeable, hoping
she’s not right about what she thinks the doctor’s done there’s
myself wind
whipping against my rump there
are hands forcing my orifices in
a room where men try daily and so earnestly to
outfit women for an upright posture— academe. There
are certain subjects a poem cannot own: the
impropriety of our common fate. A Letter My
Father Will Never Read In the most remote room on the white wall by the stairs that lead down to the porch to the garden—where Spring is grey and purple where winter covers the bird bath with wind and rage now and the fireplace you built (according to the photograph) when you used to build is filled with dry leaves growing wet and layered like seashells in an ocean of ice— in this room that I’ve missed every year or avoided whose doorway, I thought, led to nowhere on the wall by the stairs that I dreamt you carried me up, a child asleep in your arms— a map of Sicily behind glass each place each particular province’s name hand-drawn in sea-washed calligraphy an old map of an older island this is all I know and that grandfather came from Palermo that our sea is the Mediterranean that as grandpop, in America, was dying he dreamt he was taking a bus to Syracuse/Siracusa home he must never have shared for you never gave me its songs now after too many years of dreams where you do not recognize me where I scream at the gaze of your glazed over eyes I press my hands to the glass and try to find our faces in names too long foreign in the dividing lines of this strange hot island I try to draw new eyes that are our own standing here alone I wonder why they can never meet: my skin and the surface my heart and the words themselves. Designs My grandfather lived in our basement, in the hard, oiled surfaces of tools and raw sounds from his machines. Their noises drew me down, and a sawdust scent led me to watch the intricate mystery of turret lathes or delicate bite of the bandsaw inching its design through wood, all in the light of naked bulbs and ancient goose-neck lamps. My eye followed motors, belts, and grey-metal housings to a focused tension of spinning blades and drill bits. Seeing me, he’d cut the power and smile, pronouncing my name slowly, Italianate and diminutive— “Vin-cen-zi-no”— making a drawn-out and delightful sound, crafting something from my name, as if I’d shared it with a highly polished precision tool or with baroque designs etched gracefully in wood. This summer, my brother and I dismantled the last big drill press, its huge motor-housing like a ponderous
brow, and the whole of it a strange, pagan
monument. Heavy work—piece by piece, we laid each on the floor and wrapped it in cloth for transport. Sometimes, the cords broke, but finally we bound the heavy shapes and carried each one, slowly, carefully, up and out. A Day the
Horses Would Not Move (A story from my
grandmother’s time) They are not dumb animals, these horses, They know things—the road and way home, and all the stops for the wagon; they know me and my voice, and I think they know evil, maybe they smell it in the wind. Today, they give me trouble, stop in the road and block the street, and then they will not move. I yell, I scream—they stand still. People yell from the machines and other
wagons, so I get down and try to pull. But the horses look strange in the eyes, there is fear in the eyes I do not understand. “My name is Carlo, Carlo Guiliani,” I
tell the big Irish policemen, but they call me Carl, and do not care that who I am is important to me. They do not understand when I tell them “Today, my horses act crazy, with the evil in their eyes I never see before.” But even the policemen cannot make the horses move until they change back and become my horses again, not crazy ones. Tonight, I go home, and there are policemen again, and the priest, and the old women. My wife, Angelina, she has the same look as the horses, the crazy look in the
eyes, she sits and does not move, and I am
afraid. Everyone is in front of the house and I cannot get in. The priest pulls me away, across the
street, and makes me sit on the bench by
Manzone’s store. He talks to me, and then Manzone gives me
wine. Now, it is late, and I come back to where the horses stop today. I bring a basket of bread with me and the second bottle of Manzone’s wine. If you stop, I will give you bread and a little wine, too— I cannot sell—I give it away. Come here, maybe you want the old bread. I don’t care, but I am like the horses and I know what the horses know when they smell it in the wind. Holy Madonna, what do you mean by this? Today, Angelina falls asleep, and in the back of the shop the oven starts the fire that climbs the stairs where the babies are asleep. Holy sweet Madonna, why is this— not much fire, but enough to make smoke, enough to make death, enough to make the horses know all this. I am Carlo Guiliani, the baker, you know me—I go to church, I light the candles for you. I cannot bake the bread for the altar, I bake the bread for the people, is that not good? It is good bread, and here I give it away, and I would give it to you, if you would come now. Why is it you want more from me? The candles are not enough, the bread is not enough— you want the babies asleep, asleep in the little beds, caught in smoke and fire from the ovens— this is the bread you want from me? The priest said that this is the way, the strange way the Lord works. He says they are with you now, and he tells me I must give back to God what God asks. I see this, I give— now my other bread means nothing, so I give that too—I stand in the street, shouting at people to take my bread and share my wine, and I tell them to light candles in the
church. Tonight, I talk crazy, Madonna, forgive me, but I must drink and shout. I fall down in the street, on my knees in the mud, and shout and cry to you and your son, and you will both forgive me because this is all I can do to keep from being like the horses and the evil in the eyes. THREE
SESTINAS FOR RAFAEL CAVALIERI In Search of My Grandfather 1. Rome The first thing you notice is the flight
attendant stealing a crying child’s nose, like my grandfather, who couldn’t speak
English, communicating love to me. Yeats said the center does not hold yet time forms a center in the hills
north of Rome. The air is drenched with my father’s life
in Rome with the wine of the Tiber attendant to the walls of this old city which hold memories of places I’ve never been; the nose of a fountain called Triton, finds me leaning in with others throwing coins and
English Prayers to Athena, Rome’s goddess,
chanting the English words “The reverse of amore is Rome.” Saint Assisi protects all this, the city
and me. Garibaldi united Italy making Rome
attendant to its states, as leader, putting its
nose out into the world, grabbing all the
power it could hold. The creation of the heavens and the earth
hold the universe of Adam and Eve while our
English eyes search the Sistine for the nose of a serpent creeping across the seven
hills of Rome. How can I find what is gone here, the
past attendant, to the blood of my ancestors still lost
in me. The pines of the surrounding land speak
to me telling of roads toward Tuscany which
hold the secrets of the past, a man who lived
attendant to a world of wealth in Florence, who
left for English soil and a poverty unknown. I think of
this in Rome as we leave to find Siena and Padua. I
follow my nose From city to city as our cars nose through countrysides and hills which call
me on, past abandoned farms, tile roofs,
pink walls, Rome. Goodbye, Grandfather whose memory I hold, Goodbye Rafael, you saw this city last,
before English grief reframed your life with all its
pain attendant. As the fog lifts over the mountains of
Bologna, attendant to the yellow salmon brown pink of Italy,
an English thought reminds us that the center we
seek will not hold. In Search of My Grandfather 2. Florence When you were in Siena what did you see on these crooked streets where no one
knew you, where you studied during undergraduate
days. My dreams of this are in a cup which
fills to spill its sides with feelings which have no
language, and must be found, along with clean paper
to write this. Cats have no memory, yet they recognize.
This thought is with me because I came to
Siena to see what I would recognize. You walked with
the language of these Italian birds flying by, as flew
near you years before the religious war would
spill inside your heart and lead you away from
Italy’s quiet days. Florence was where you stayed and had
your bride during days numbered in their joy—Firenze—sweet
capital of this country before it moved to Rome. Floods
still spill these shores every hundred years. One can
see grief behind an old city inside old walls
you walked, a cemetery of hopes buried in
your language. Michelangelo began statues, imprisoned in
a language of stone, commissioned by Julius those
days then called back to Rome. Did you also leave undone figures in your memory,
as this marble block holds something for us to
see — unfinished shapes and suggestions which
spill To our imagination for completion, which
spill from the prison of marble to the freedom
of language. Famous David is 500 years old and we see a figure you looked at 100 years ago
during your days here. We both stood nearby a perfect
form, studying this large right hand which denotes strength.
Did you Stand like this and walk closer? How
could you know I would be here so long after you,
ready to spill my thoughts on paper, taking all this as my own, the city of flowers in
sunlight, the language of Florence in the rain, the pain of
Dante during the days where Latin was transformed to sounds
we’d say and see. The marble quarried in this region is
language left standing. The white, red, and green
from early days stays, and what the young man Rafael saw,
I now see. In Search of My Grandfather 3. Venice Two different climates meet near Padua.
From the sea a warmth, from the Apennines, the
Austrian cold. This moves us nearer Venice past the
apple trees pinned against their wires, the pruned
grape vine ready to burst, the plastic over its
seedling ground, the peace of mountains north of Padua,
past the flat Land we travel so we can reach Venezia.
The villas are flat wide houses where Italians fought Germans
until the sea of Venice added mercy to the misery of
this bloody ground. Once, Venetian horse traders and
fishermen worked their cold wind and waters to win ten centuries of
power, the vine of time runs through this country’s
broken trees. It is strange to say in Venice that there
are now no trees but that 450 bridges cross centuries of
water winding flat within its alleys. Here the canals weave
a vine within a golden city sinking wooden
pilings to a sea of time. My father left in 1912 and his
cold childhood still floats through the silt
of sinking ground. The first shipyard in all the world
existed on this ground. I love the thought of Venice emerging
from the trees of 13th-century beliefs to venture into
the earth’s cold waters. Marco Polo crossed a map people
thought was flat, to pick the flowers and the spices of the
world by sea tossing across the oceans a city’s green
imperial vine. My Venetian father never lost his regal
past, the vine of glory in his spine. He knew his early
ground was that of palaces and kings, and then
the strange sea of love changed his plans and drew him
deep inside the trees of Sicily to find a bride so unlike him
that the flat northern air would make the lemon trees
die of cold. Through the wide open windows of Sicily
the cold air seldom enters. Only the winds
breathe. Only the vine of Aetna’s smoke moves up the coast to
praise its flat lands above a river of lava rising from
ancient ground. Since Norman times grain grew beyond
these trees and is brought to altars, wheat of lava
and the sea. We speed faster than the sun travels
toward the sea. It seems our lives are racing past these
olive trees hungry to grow our heart’s slow root in
Italy’s ground. apartment
hotel in barcelona (June 1993) I . . . and then there
was you tall, slender, straight, broad shoulders, loping step you scaled the stairs and
stole my heart away. . . . and then there
was you soft voice, tender mouth, glistening
eyes, a hand across the table was
all it took to make you mine. . . . and then there
was you strong back, long legs, sweet
taste, your hands upon my breasts like rain on morning grass. . . . and then there
was you mount I lay astride, soul aloft and on into the sky. and
then and now never day to come, nor sun to stop the image of
your flight, nor end this night of nights. II And if I had
said I wanted you forever, to bear your sons, leave country,
home, awake, to see
me in the light? And if I told
you Don’t go I cannot live without you Love me never leave me. And what if I had shown you my
true self, not my body shrouded in half
light, but aging
with its wrinkles and its slights? Would you
have loved me still? Would you
have celebrated my flesh? Would you
have sung my brilliance and my wit? Better not to
know but let you take your leave and that that
night of nights (ripeness is all) remain in its dark place and not dissolve in quotidian
space. On the
proposition that a nation gets the cuisine
it deserves . . . the
Calabrian larder, a meager one. I have read that it has been enriched
on occasion by storks and eagles, but this I fear I am
unable to confirm.—Waverley
Root, The Food of Italy I learned
when I was old enough at table to
listen and taste that the bel canto passion of the family, beating,
rippling wings of flight, could
enhance the simplest meal. Laughter,
outrage or other joy concerning
this still-new land, crazy as
Calabria but grand as dreams of
flight and fall, and at least
one adult a meal, face Chianti
red, would throw the napkin
down, stalk off, glasses of
wine and water and the eyes
of children vibrating
with each receding step. To eat was
to know what to think. Fish meant
God had died but once a
year salted cod, baccala, was some wondrous birth, gifts of torrone and panettone. I’d break my
haunted fast with dawn
prayers and crusts of bread in
steamy milk and a little
bitter coffee, to reverence
the ancestors. At noon, it
was insults. From
lunchbox would come the salami
or melanzan and the
hoots of fairer boys with last
names of O’ or -ski. They’d hold
their noses at the
grated pecorino Romano, call me guinea, dago, wop— but this was
America, so for them too
there were new names. Sunday
dinner, garlic cloves glistened in
olive oil like wedding
petals, darkening to worked
church wood until music filled
our every room. Even hunks
of bony gristle, fatty
strings of stewing hen and sausage
like fire aged hours in
bubbling tomato, spiked with
basil and parsley. Around the
simple ritual of a table where always
there’s room and even a
bitter laughter erupts like
wild birds, there can be
no poor fare. late
honeymoon, roman forum Once blood
flooded this space, love. Seven
riotous hills where power
erupted in the streets, invasion,
punishment imperial enough to amuse
jaded crowds, impalings, gougings,
ingenious torments that soaked
the arena, Latin sand, spread to
sop up capital sport. In Medieval
plague-time popes,
goats, swine herded here. Ghosts and
poets howled at noon. When was
Rome not a place of shades? We count
each stone most holy, bright as
moonlight bedsheets. No wild
beasts visible today, but we’re
old enough to look where we
step, shards of the fatal
labor of numberless slaves strewn along
the ground, crows fastidious
in the wakes of strays,
baying tourists. We move
devoutly among ruins, the way we
made the Stations of the Cross
as Ohio youths enchanted by
textbook Latin— amo, amas, amat—and the pomp of a
painted, three-ring religion. History’s
the pebbled path we walk. We sit on a
fallen pillar near the
Mamertine Prison where Peter and
Paul, legend says, gashed water
from the rock to baptize
their pagan jailers. The very air
smells of public life, the law,
politics and poetry of the West,
stony rites which
outlast even love. Encouraged
by the gods— Saturn,
Vesta, the Dioscuri— I kiss you
and brush fingers across your
breast, shivering us both, and although
others approach you do not
push away my hand. We’re what’s
left of faith. Art is now
our altar, a place survivors
can pretend this world belongs to
them, a lie we tell together on
the way to stone. by Maryfrances Cusumano
Wagner Photograph I took it from the attic suitcase of nonna’s snapshots, a black and white past of cross-armed uncles leaning against
roadsters, cousins sucking in pasta, bisnonna in the fields of Bivona, papa laying peonies over gravestones— faces before I was born. In this shot, nonna stands beside a
Pieta, one hand clutching an alligator bag, one hand over her heart, alone with God at Capistrano. When I stayed with her, she clicked rosary beads, eyes half mast, silk stockings rolled to
ankles, her lips shaping words she never shared. After she knelt for prayers at bedtime, she turned down our blankets, said goodnight to nonno, who slept in his own bed, then climbed between satin sheets, alone, as she always was with God. Gardenias I can’t remember when mistletoe and males in the same room stopped making me forget what I was
saying, or when gin tonics between dances were worth Sunday’s hangover. But gardenias are still arresting when I enter a room and their scent hovers near some arrangement. Like a call from home they return me to gardenias my mother grew and floated in snifters throughout the
house. When she clipped blossoms for our hair, their ivory faces startling in her
chestnut darkness, the fragrance called me inward, a woman in brown study returning to her secrets, forgetting what she was saying, her eyelashes sometimes aflutter. In Your Own
Way When you show up, Father, it’s always
with that smile that had widows bring casseroles and need new wall switches. I find you in the faces of white-headed
husbands waiting near dressing rooms, their laps
full of sacks. I smell you still in your hairbrush and
bathrobe, if I plant too deep, hear your voice in
the garden. When I chop garlic, it’s your hands at
the knife. As I stare over water, I see you reeling
line back, your cooler full of crappie. The first time you returned in a dream, we lounged on lawn chairs in your
basement, drank your best wine. Gesturing with paddle fingers, rocking oars in an air sea, you said I needed a man. Today, as we watch gulls skim waves, my husband lounges beside me, the man you picked in your own way; as he nods at my dancing hands, they are your hands in the air, your words on my tongue. THE VIRGIN Cathedral-dim and charged. Her glorified
face. An old lady lights a votive candle. Queer residue of mythic time, the aged, frayed and stooped, kneeling in
hopelessness. Once every woman’s face revealed her
face, persistent pattern through every rise and
fall. Shadow of fruit at every woman’s feet, she was the lap where every breath
expired. Now she’s a billboard show for crowds at
night. An old man’s vision in a mildewed wall. Against her there is only a void. A tale of miseries, sorrowful years of stress. Effaced like stone by wind and running
water, her beauty in the flesh is meaningless. ANCESTORS The elderly sit on a rulered line thin as paper, edged narrow as a cut. At ninety-eight my mother’s father lodged
on a Brooklyn ledge so narrow swallows
tipped him vertiginously into air. Antenato. From his second story window the light
was shut. I burn a piece of paper and watch the ash
flake and rise on the currents of the
heat. Dart, and sail, like swallows at dusk. My
father. These words. That word. On a sheet of
filler paper. Priests are almost all elderly now. Turned pages falling out of the book. No sacrament to bless their speechless
fall. And upward floating drift, smokeless
pall. CATHOLIC
SCHOOL In Catholic school Franciscan monks in
black, white ropes knotted with aves round their
waists, taught us the meaning of Christ. Those
virile men. And when we didn’t listen they beat us
blind. The girls were taught by nuns in another
building. Separate playground hours kept us apart. But summers on the beach destroyed that
tyranny. Our throbbing motors nudged us hull to
hull. A lifetime later, Fascists long since
dead, and Communists choking on their Spartan
bread, a girl whose name I can’t remember lifts my hand and runs her finger across my
palm. That nitro-glycerin touch could blast a
hole through hell, did, and will—nerve-fuse
and womb! LIFE
WITHOUT A WHORE When the house is full of relatives, two
tables are laid with plates, one in the kitchen
for children. There my sisters and younger cousins sit on stacks of books, getting a purchase on
Babel. The men smoke cigarettes and cigars, talk
money, winnings at the racetrack, baseball, play
poker. The women work, listen, gossip about whores, bitches, stinginess, aging, men. Nothing changes but the children in the
kitchen. Everyone’s shifted a generation. And I, accustomed to the women’s talk, prefer the whores and bitches, gossip about the
passions— Medalia d’Oro’s rich black taste is good though graves need tending and the whores
have vanished. shine The shoe shine man makes his rounds on the Staten Island Ferry His shouts of “shine” filling the air like the spewings of an ancient oracle Reminding me of my grandfather his accent and assonance soothes me as a Neapolitan lullaby My drowsiness interrupted by snickers and whispers of “greaseball” and “wop” Hurt and anger rises within me like a red hot sun serving as a storm warning over this land of immigrants trackings I. The deer’s hoof punctured the
newly fallen
snow with
the crack of
a shotgun Father
and son sit long
enough to
say i
love you or
just smoke
a cigarette No
blood escapes the
struggling deer’s mangled
stomach The
boy takes aim at
the bloating carcass II. The boy with a syringe as
dull as
his senses jabs
skin white
and brittle as
a communion wafer Scarred and
swollen arms fall as
herds of
galloping deer enter damaged veins to be read
at the italian-american club Is it a good thing, though To be a drudge for the capitalist swine ? It’s a
good thing, sure To
drudge for the capitalist swine
! But there they
were starving. How can one argue ? Yet Starving ? To undertake Such a journey while starving ? Across the Atlantic And starving ? In steerage, Sleeping on straw? But no prospects there ? Perhaps, perhaps not. But who ever knows What the prospects are ? Is it right to leave language And culture and country To drudge for the capitalist swine ? I repeat the question. ballad of
lost places Andalusia when will I see Your rivers, your many streams, And when will I ever see Your fields of yellow grain ? Andalusia, and the heat Of my north country hills— Where are the burning fields Where my feet must touch the earth ? Calabrian olive groves, Forgotten, remembered home, Calabrian midnight And the Tuscan dawn. Bright Sicilian summer And black honey from the heat, The volcano sleeping In the roots of the carob tree. O gardens of the Piedmont With your innocents unslain, How can your fountains flower Into my origins again ? Green olives and black honey, The gardens and carob trees, The Rome of my fathers’ fathers And the virgin Roman spring. Songs from the Provencal, And the singer’s voice is heard Unaccompanied and clear And forgotten in dead Provence. Forgotten, Provencal, Andalusian, Sicilian hills, Forgotten olive groves Of Calabria and Rome. Ethnic
Erasure It is as if we have been gagged by ridicule and fear till the third generation. Shhh, be quiet, Zia scolded Nona whenever she tried to
teach us the Italian names of foods,
furniture, dishes. Stop, don’t say any
more, you’re confusing the children. Like criminals, we gathered in Greatnona’s kitchen to ask
about the forbidden newspaper
clippings, blurry photos of burly men
with parted hair and huge walrus
mustaches. Our history comes in mosaic
stones of accidental anecdotes, overheard conversations. Whispered references and half
truths have fermented over the years
and now itch in my brain like a
lingering abscess. I wonder what shame pushed our
family identity so far underground and cemented over truth with such seamless denial. Beneath this thin American
facade heredity’s temper flares with curiosity and questions assimilation’s ethnic
cleansing won’t entirely quench. Self
Determination During our walk through la
familia orchard, you apologize for not knowing how
to tell me about going to college. You
worried about security, but saw no solutions other
than marriage. When you were a girl, no one talked about scholarships and
how to earn independence through
education. Instead, you saw the daily
world as a threat through the eyes of a victim. Today we discover we have done success without training
wheels, learned from mistakes and gut-knotting
terror in the crucible of fear, upon the rack of loud,
shouting anger. Somehow, between the jobs, housework, and husbands, we fought to make space for our obstinate dreams. Juggling night school and canning, field work and
cooking, we accepted the arguments, guilt, and exhaustion. Alone and determined, we became our own midwives pulling credentials, careers, poetry, publications, and
respect from the contracting core of our
low self-esteem. Lessons Nona, I remember
you charging around the orchard in your denim bib
overalls and black high-heeled pumps yelling at us to
pick up fallen peaches because four saved buckets of
fruit represented the cost of a whole loaf of
bread. You taught me to
gather bread heels, paper sacks, mason jars, and
old cans for some clever reuse. Poverty turned you
into an inventor, a wry genius of ways to
transform trash into clever gadgets
of incredible utility, a kitchen
alchemist who could revive even dying
vegetables in a boiling brew of
hot minestrone. Later, mother told
me of the hard times and a Christmas
when you swallowed your pride and accepted the
charity check that would buy your
girls presents. I see you,
half-crippled, limping off to the bank, and feel equally
cheated when you find the
draft isn’t signed and can never be
cashed. How many scripts
for correcting the error did you
create in your head? Nona, each time I
hear the story of you going back
and having to ask again, I internally writhe, squirm from the
powerlessness that presses shame
like a burning iron against my trapped
mind. PIGEONS At six a.m. they leave the perch next door to swim We hear them flap harmonious mayhem, that kind of rapture, only faster: Gloved ave, rock doves, is it time to rise? The ground above’s they aver of their three-story tumbledown coop,
over Little wonder their glide is so sound: One flight
feather on around (watch for that flexed cowlicked wire!)
one thousand in hook-and -bow barbules that bind you, nearly a million of those! All hail the bravura, A spade as a spade and the tail of this dove’s a misnomer. mounted softly on top of that well-oiled and elbowy whistles. We hear them siss into the early GIUSEPPINA’S
PETITION Collecting my vials
of holy water in the bureau drawer,
I keep my kinspeople thriving from afar.
In specific, from the Motor City,
where the Detroit nightlights look like
some shunned galaxy’s stretched out across
earth. Get this: I had visions of becoming a
striptease/belly dancer, limbs flouncing
artlessly along the cement ledge at Custer
School as a kid. O glorious, most sorrowful, daily
regaled Mother, forgive! I have sown
fathomless mum rosaries so’s to know
better. That
I am my sister’s keeper,
my slowly heaven-bending mother’s mom—indeed,
lay patroness to a score of loved
ones gathered in the blood, eleven nephews plus
my second cousin’s misbegotten niece for
whom I nightly offer up these laminated rose
petals, the everlasting pink of uncooked new
potatoes, tested for cures and
conversions and blessed at the apparition
site of Our Lady of the Roses,
Flushing, New York: All of the above I
know. What I
can’t figure out is what
I’d have to give had I not just early
enough been so politely snatched
up by the Most High’s satin talons. Seeing
as how I have to make a gift of
simply getting by, I’ve sold all my
strictly earth-intended goods: my scapular
wool-brown Buick Skylark, plus the
watch and gold-filled trolley car charm
granted me as part of GM’s pension when I was
retired. Heaven only knows but that
contemplating the Divine we may well learn the
little worth of things of time. I know I’ve now
become light as all that
silvery plumed pampas grass I watch blowing
in slim clusters when I head west to
visit my sister. Aside from all this,
I’ve taken to repeating
inconspicuous novenas at the women’s gym
and to reciting, oh, say, 90-some-odd Hail
Marys in concert with Saint Gabriel
and all the millions of Hail Marys being
said all over the world, thereby
balancing silent singing in unison
with not forgetting to breathe. In my one-piece to barely
mid-thigh bluegreen spandex, I
heave and rise numberless reps, my
Nikes never lifting higher than a set of
hands in prayer. Hasn’t someone holy
ever said how nicely exercise helps
ease the sinsick? Still and all, I
manage to keep my own belly sufficiently
full while softly taut as any teen’s.
So I go about my
days. . . . I huff and pray: Our Father, 10 Hail Marys, 14 Glory Bes. Amen, and one quick pitch to
infuse the car industry with
something like faith. As goes the Motor City, so
goes the state of the meek. Lord! I bind these
snow-white buds with a petition
for the virtue of detachment from
the world and humbly lay this bouquet at
thy feet. il caffÈ The pastry’s warm here in this shop they talk about me I recognize the words the tazza d’espresso’s hot the sfogliatelle has citron and a center soft and creamy carta di Sicilia covers tiled walls curved wrought iron chair
presses into my spine reminding lemon rind on the saucer crumbs on the plate notebook open my pen moves across the page the Italian soccer game on la televisione Each customer saunters in after church the language forms a backdrop words that define illuminate, roll from the tongue envelope, invite in they form the formless here in the shop my caffè becomes cold the pastry sticks to my fingers Sicilia looks more frayed than I first noticed the brick is fake the tiles cheap maybe I am not olive skinned enough to look like I belong perhaps our grandparents rode horses together in Messina noi cugini lived in stone huts on the same rocky shore but for
today I intrude for the promise of il
caffè ushered out with cruel words they don’t know I understand figs Sweet juice runs through my fingers as I bite the purple skin Seeds push against my tongue as it prods the milky cavity How do I explain the joy of a fresh- from-the-tree fig to a non-believer It’s like trying to experience grapes when you have only tasted raisins I recall my grandfather how he buried the tree each fall digging a trench before the
frost moving the promise of ripe
fruit underground Now, at the market I imagine their taste their color beckons seems just right Yet thick juice resides around hard seeds and mealy pulp no sweetness yields from my tongue’s pressure Memory must suffice aroma helps perhaps in a warmer climate I can marry the memory with the dream Like those Sicilian saplings wrapped in cloths carried with hope planted in New Jersey connecting with all that is sweet in Messina Letter to
Diane di Prima One day you will go to the land of your forefathers. You will set foot on that three-cornered island, touch the earth, and say: here, here is where it all started. Here is where I get it from, the pride and the imagination, the passion and the reserve, the quickness to take offense, the
quickness to forgive, the strength and the
endurance. Here, here where the wind carries the scent of
jasmine all the way from the shores of North
Africa, where the South Wind whispers dark tales in the summer heat, where the sea is the color of wine, as when Odysseus sailed upon it. Here, you’ll say, I am at the navel of the earth. This is Demeter’s land. Here she let her scythe fall. Here was Persephone abducted. Here blinded Polyphemus tossed boulders after the wily Greek. And here the Gods dwelled, in these temples riding honey-colored from fields of poppies bending in the
wind, here they consorted, within these
colonnades. Here, from Aetna’s crater one descends to the bowels of the earth, where the Mysteries are played out in fire and sulphur. Here people have eyes like black olives or turquoise-green like ancient Vikings.
Here all houses are made of stone, here people are turned to stone by hardship and by sorrow. Here you’ll listen to the language you
first heard from your grandparents, sonorous, deep or high-pitched, dramatic even in the simplest expressions. From these coastlines—you’ll say—thick
with clusters of crimson oleanders, from these cliffs studded with blooming cactus, ships
sailed forth carrying my forefathers to the New World. Looking at the dry agaves, at the parched countryside, at the stark shadows the ruins cast onto the fields, you will say: this land does not coddle. This land knows no compassion. But it is a glorious land. It is the land the Gods used to tread on. And now I’m treading it. SICILIAN
SUITE for Laura Stortoni 1. We had (they
say) no lemons till the Arabs brought them nor this red hair (of mine) until the Normans we were a small sea people (bred for an island) came
& went to Carthage easier than Rome. 2. We faced south &
east song of the waves on the North African coast & Fez before
it had that name 3. The roads of Malta, her dark temples where we found dreams, returned them like
pearls to our caves the
sweet smell of our air when the lava flowed secret caches of sulfur of mercury of
other more holy minerals I may not name 4. Long days we women took to love each
other long days of dalliance (before
Greece , before Egypt) the mother held us in her lap we
were lap of the mother: Sicilia,
Malta Africa
& Crete what need had we of Europe? 5. & Dido was a fool to love a man to turn the attention away from the inner spiral coil of joy ,
coil of birth & death we
held she gave it like
a jewel to the lowest of swine or we did we all did &
the temples crumbled the
caves began to stink the lava destroyed instead
of blessing us. We turned our eyes north & west to
barbaric places. Men who worked iron. carried death. 6. The Arabs cd not save us tho they tried (to
save at any rate, the land for themselves) They
planted lemons pomegranates , grapes but
the iron was sunk in the sweetest of their fruits they too had looked west had
seen the culture of death the sword & the double
axe locked in their heart of hearts in the direst ultimate battle. 7. Now we are here, California we seek on this Western shore (as
far West as it gets) taste of the prickly pear light of sea air blowing
against dry hills madrone & manzanita I
say like prayer creosote bush I
gather for abeyance sage brush & cedar (sometimes lemon cedar) & juniper for
blessing tho the songbirds carry different
melodies & the light, the angle of the sun, is skewed & the land here is not soaked in that bittersweetness that came to us there when we first
turned from looking south when we turned from the east where it is always dawn and placed our attention on the awkward
strangers blonde, pale & luminous who stood on
our shores with death in both their hands. |