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POETRY By: Joseph O. Aimone,
Charles Cantalupo, Grace Cavalieri, Gilda Morina Syverson,
Joy Passanante, Karen Piconi, and Francine Poppo Rich Tomás The Forty-Niner used to be its name. Beneath the towering orange billiard
ball, The idling diesels mutter in their
dreams. Inside, the pinballs thump and clack and
cling, The steel guitar and nasal voices whine Their stories from the jukebox in the
lounge. Tom holds back sleep by will with hazy
eyes When No-Doze, chocolate bars and
truckstop coffee Have failed. He rests his blue
shine-stubble cheeks In both palms propped by elbows on the
counter. He’s swaybacked like a cowboy’s worn-out
horse, Tail end stuck out, hips hung with bags
of jelly. Purple fluorescents gleam on display
cases, The costume jewelry and dolls inside A fog of scratches. Crooked paper signs With wobbly magic marker numbers cringe And wave back at the door, propped open Before the blast of rancid summer wind, A little cool at four A.M. but sour With restaurant garbage. Men camp in the
lot, Work lumping loads of furniture for
movers For twenty bucks a day, enough for redeye And steaming plates of pasty cafe
biscuits With lard and flour gravy, called “Homestyle,” The breakfast special. They wash up and
shave In Men’s Room sinks with that dispenser
soap Called “Pearly Pink.” (The busboys
shooting up Inside the stalls don’t bother to be
quiet.) Awareness wobbles off—he rescues it In time to see the woman with pierced
nipples, The rings just visible beneath her
tank-top, Strolling across his itchy field of
vision. He’s thinking how the drawer will end
today, Counting the money till it comes out
right, Watching the numbers twist and flow away, The adding machine running out of paper, Printing blind totals on the platen. Tom is half Maidu and half Pilipino But speaks only English. Drives a Caddy He had rebuilt from engine to upholstery. He nicknames everyone except his boss, Calling you by the thing that makes you
maddest. He gives a ham to everyone at Christmas And takes men in that give their lives to
God, Provided they do everything Tom says. Rebelliousness he will not tolerate, For Man’s first sin was disobedience. Tom’s getting old. His spirit’s almost
broken. He runs the lottery pool and saves his
money. He keeps a gun at home and practices On beer-cans in his back yard every day. He thinks about the robbery last year: The bottle, broken necked, the gleaming curve Of greenish glass pushed hard against his
neck. The voice: “Now open up the drawer. It’s
mine.” Frozen, he’d felt warm piss go down his
leg. There’d been no answer when he called for
help -— Security was shaking down the whores For love or money out in the back lot. It’s graveyard shift, not far from Sutter’s
Fort -— This is a place that tempted people once, People with nothing, to risk everything, With a desire that nothing satisfies. The gold rush never ended, just the
gold. Georgette Georgette worked hard at two jobs, one
for pay And one that was her personal project. She was in charge of everything displayed For sale but talked with nearly every
trucker. She kept her accent, French vowels
stretched around American words, her too-taut blouse
swelling Almost unstitched by surging perfumed
breasts. Her red hair kept a hint of gold, debased By much exchange and drugstore chemistry. Her spiked heels slowed her tread and let
her hips Find out their range. The rules were
simple: chance Affairs that led to nothing serious Were not encouraged, but her drawing
stares Was not forbidden. She could still do
well While working only by the hour, if She found a man who’d marry her to keep
her From having to go back to rural France. She’d talk about the Eiffel Tower,
hinting That she would like to see America To every driver. She would take them home To see her lingerie collection, drink Cafe au lait and dance, and some would
stay A night or two and some would run. The jokes about her said she kept them
slaves, Made them house-pets, or even sucked them
dry And varnished them, displaying them in
alcoves, To be admired, adjusted, dusted,
near. My Italian
Heritage We know we are Italian, but we don’t Know what it’s like, at least not much. You need more than the blood, more than
the name. You need the rituals, the expectations, The food, the language and the family
stories. My family name comes from Turin, up near The borders where the Swiss and Austrians Cross over. Grandma used to say that Joe (My grandfather) said if we found his
mother’s People, we wouldn’t come back to America— She came away from money and position To marry my great-grandfather. He left Her with the baby, while he sneaked his
way Into the USA without a passport. Two years and he was ready: he went back For her but she did not survive to come. He brought his second wife with him
instead, Changing his name at Ellis Island, so We’ve lost the second half of who we are. My great-grandfather built a prosperous
ranch, Made his own wine, and his guests had to
drink it. My grandfather was a real cowboy,
wrangled On ranches in Wyoming—not his dad’s Because (it’s said) he wanted his own
way, Which is a family trait I haven’t given
up. He found a girl whose family name was
French, Though she was English and a stubborn
hellion. She’d never let a young man walk her home If she smelled liquor while she danced
with him, Though she would dance against her father’s
warnings. (She kept a man out of her kitchen once Because she couldn’t be seen without her
stockings Under her floor-length dress. He nearly
froze.) She married Joe—it gets confusing here Because Joe’s father’s name was Joe, and
so is mine. Joe spoke Italian with his father, Basque With the sheep-herders, Spanish and a bit
of French, But English was the ranch-hand’s tongue.
Erma, His wife, hired on as cook. They lived in
the grub-house Until her time for lying-in. Three times She came back from her mother’s with a
child, My uncle, then my father, then my aunt. She tended babies while she cooked and cleaned For the whole bunkhouse full of spitting,
swearing, Dusty, work-stinking men. The rodeo Was Joe’s idea of fun. Erma had gone To see her mother—just a visit this time— Her middle son, my dad, eleven months Into his life, when Joe burst his
appendix. He died before the anesthetic had worn
off. The doctor said his heart was far
enlarged. There were no jobs for single mothers
then, Except remarriage. She had three more
girls. My grandmother still says that if he’d
lived She would have had a piano in the parlor. Address 442 Between
this address and where I
think it is, the ivy Replenishes
itself with roots in the air, I
live my dead father And
try to write my family on mud Without
betrayals into mere history Or
music instead of the spontaneous Rituals
of light in knots of pulsing jewels Through
the network of earth black nerve To
carry the history and music to come, The
divination bowl, a woman At
a loom, weaving at the root, Yet
also at a stem like this address, Her
butterfly colored cloth to wrap Wounds
in the world, her children, and her man, Healing
herself and them with her body And
abstract designs she names. An Immigrant’s
Grandson Blind
man enjoying a movie, I
see her names, too, in this ivy Meaning
wine and god enough to rub Her
story like my teeth, find four legs For
my head at the altar of her hand And
jump the powerful engine drenched in chartreuse pollen And
smoking through the forest halves of raw And
civilized, cultured and primal, on curves Blocking
the vision of it left in flames But
not the lust in ashes to make icons Out
of nowhere: invention and Accumulation
gifting them with tools Alchemically
one with their users and any scraps They
throw in to find happiness, As
I have, living between this address And
where I think it is, sucking fruit Once
forbidden and now without effect Because
I was forbidden, too, And
now live here with no need to beg For
anything but truth from both sides Of
the lie that represents this place, Unless
it includes the familiar stranger’s face Of
innocent people’s dignity. Gustav Grunewald (Moravian
American painter, 1805–78) This
broken stump in the shade dominates The
foreground to measure any view Of
the ideal origin, innocence and law And
reduce it to an impossibly round Calypso
seducing with pencil lines too blue, Grass
like a brush, nothing but solos, Lonely
rivers, mountains too steep for their slopes, Exotic
laurels and pines peaceful with crows, The
whitest of creeks and most inviting gaps, Glossy
mists and twenty-story waterfalls Powering
into my viscera the hope They
really exist, that I might want these things With
a straight seminary of dark windows, Where
women need companions and men to be alone; A
steeple transmitting dreams of room at the inn And
a god but not violets, local slate And
children’s bones owning the burial ground; The
town when it also named the road In
the fields with no fence (though it’s in a photo), In
winter from the north and summer from The
south, no other way; and conscience Calm
as a locked canal, two men fishing, And
a third about to capsize in a boat Added
like an afterthought yet equally remote From
the real experience I want to grub Among
these scenes: the sprouting kernel Of
this address when it looked like them; My
home on their “High Street,” still highest And
now my street, even my baby says so. Mud My
immigration ends with colonials Shrinking
to mere evidence And
what it doesn’t show: their graveyard down the hill; An
invitation to decompose and contemplate The
fierce discovery and reconstruct Its
image through alternating appearances And
their inversions to sustain the present Faithful
as the past in its devotion To
the home and scrubbing its floors with basil, The
bridge with a tree growing through its middle, The
waterfalls’ level and a kinship code With
a fingery fist from the sky Flattening
the earth so it can flood Into
my eyes, deconstructing even Themselves
to re-use the piled-up boards And
survive the poisoning of oceans By
the solitary gardener uprooting ivy And
ferns, salting the land, planting broken frames Of
the sublime—cartilage, ribs and backbones— And
forgetting they retain power to condemn Any
address down to its mud: Its
children’s play, the most important Source
and resource, tinted nutmeg, The
first step and a bench to rest; Mud
house, oven, animal, adored, Jars
for water, a window on dawn, No
straight lines, round corners, fawn Colored
incline of a wall inscribed with star, Vine,
crescent, stork, smile and embedding Of
broken dishes, herbs, fronds and a car Headlight
to deflect the evil eye. This
mud on my address won’t let it die. Two Recordings I
listen in the ivy to a music— A
gift never lost when it plays Back
first in the spirit that it’s given, Talking
almost to no one of nothing nowhere And
never heard before, an evolving arrangement Of
lush, honest, immediate ore— An
address for a domestic God
to dance its ceremony of mere everyday With
willing bodies awake with birdsong before Sunrise:
the same god’s monkeys hanging on the first suspension Bridge
of chain links, happy between wine and diesel exhaust; Between
white devils in a row of warm brick Houses
set in snowy fields and black concrete Progress
of glass and steel, debt and the dead And
buried, skins and gourds, shit and a love dream; Between
sleeping lines and a crocodile chest, Hair
glue and wind, sex and sulfur, hammer and clay, Wattle
and daub, easel and albumen, Negative
and canvas, salt and synthetic colors, Oil
blanket and nothing local, cotton and rayon, Silver
and no pose, peace and cloth cash, The
bleaching sun and whitewash For
every spring to decorate With
a letter and appliqued story Formed
in a human profile yet serrated To
prevent disease and printed with children’s Hands
for protection, a corncob, the navel Scarred
from giving birth, and a scattering of seeds In
indigo so deep, rich and sweet It
seeps past the hourglass border to make a stream Taking
the wealthy sea to undeserved poverty. I
play back sounds of shells as the healer moves In
waves of circles, diamonds, triangles And
squares strongest in their sense of surface— White
nuts on the black soil, pans and pots In
a string bag, funeral red, safety pins To
count for power, neck of the suicide hero, Thick
wire to hobble a truck, mistakes crossed Intentionally
for beauty, mother snake fierce for her eggs— Uneven
texture, zig zag, bump, dent, dot: The
difference to continue Beyond
the untriumphant and innocent origin, The
despair of imitating only less, The
deserter’s death sentence, And
neither woman nor man secure without a chain And
an end to hold fast to the spiral In
and out, the roads and branches of need And
fullness within the ivy Of
this address and its domain. Letter If you ask what brings us here, staring out of our lives like animals in high grass, I’d say it was what we had in common with the other—the hum of a song we believe in which can’t be heard, the sound of our own luminous bodies rising just behind that
hill, the dream of a light which won’t go out, and a story we’re never finished with. We talk of things we cannot comprehend so that you’ll know about the inner and the outer world which are
the same. Someone has to be with us in this, and if you are, then, you know us best. And I mean all of us, the deer who leaves his marks behind him in the snow, the red fox moving through
the woods. The same stream in them is in us too although we are the chosen ones who
speak. Please tell me what you think cannot be
sold and I will say that’s all there is: the pain in our lives, . . . the love we have
. . . We bring you these small seeds. Do what you can with them. What is found in this beleaguered and beautiful land is what we write of. Their
American Hero In the garden behind your house, you pick the last of autumn’s figs. An unfiltered cigarette hangs from your mouth, smoke rises and lingers in the dream you tell of the plane that brings you back to Gualtieri. Old paesani left behind a half century ago will welcome you at the piazza where church bells announce the beginning of a day long after the rooster awakens the tiled-roof town. Through open windows, sounds of platters clang and smells of espresso follow those who leave for work in distant vineyards. As you retire to the bench in the center of town, your cousins will approach carrying plates of figs the size of baseballs. SAINTS IN
ROME It’s the
saints who spy us first— saints in
frames, ovals in nooks in stone
flecked with the bones of slaves— plastic
poppies cupping their flat necks, chipped-paint
pupils eyeing us, our Reeboks
and rotating chins, though the rest remark, don’t
flip our presence a glance. Like the woman with
stilettoes on the gas of the Harley, ass positioned
for power, skirt hiked and tight at
the thigh, black hair grabbed back by the gritty
wind swerving through the
twists of streets. We take down how churches
squander time—a thousand years nothing to summon our
random moans and ohhhs—then corrode. So willing are we to be
struck by the sudden rising up of the
Pantheon from the night steam, as though from a black
hole, though we know all this
cannot be rushed, undone
easily. As if we could
navigate the
wild avenues of the Tiber. As if stalking us,
some cool statue of death, while we give ourselves to our own
art, my belly swelled like the cherubs at
the fountain, your mouth a bronze detail, our chins
dimpled as if chiseled — in our desire, we become
momentous. Like the Oracle of
Delphi, re-touched at the Capella Sistina, her lips open for
prophesy, startled for horror. Like hundreds of
cobblestones away, Santa della Vittoria, putti peeking
from some pink marble drapery, Saint Teresa
and her young god of love, poised to give
her what he will. Good Friday
Stations Two days since I’ve slept in preparation for stations, my last hours spent pacing Aunt Rosie’s bedroom, praying vigils, waiting for our dead to rise from the cinders in her fireplace, to file beside us as we walk the way of the cross. Aunt Rosie pulls me through the Church of the Sacred Heart and Holy Child. The sanctuary runs lengthwise, a huge
tomb encased in limestone and terrazzo tile. Semi-precious jewels mark the stations. Aunt Rosie says, “Kneel, girl. Pray to the saints, especially the martyred
ones.” My free hand covers my breasts as she explains tortures young women suffered to earn their place in church history
while my rosary hand fingers beads without
memory. The saints visit me. Saint Katherine
meditates upon bloodless fingers entangled in
prayer. Cackling, Santa Barbara cracks open this
tomb to free the rest from their pedestals,
and the sun slips into darkness. When she sees me, the stone Mary abandons her station. She lifts one porcelain foot, and the snake she’s heeled down for centuries escapes, but I am too taken with the pulsing heart
in her right hand to notice how easily the snake finds a hole. Like an illusionist, squeezing fingers to palm, Mary turns the heart into air. She stretches one thin finger
at me, and I almost expect a nickel to slip from behind my ear or from under my tongue. Outside, the sun shifts. A sliver of
light seeps through stained glass, cutting a precise triangle on my breasts. Through this window of light I see straight inside me. I know then if I’d kept my eyes on the cross, the snake wouldn’t have entered my body. It twists its way through my innards until it feels an empty space and it curls into itself, settles. “Make it go away,” I whisper, raising my eyes to the saints, but they’ve taken their places. “Stone Mary,” I pray, and nothing I say moves her from the foot of the cross. Like Aunt Rosie, I shuffle, station to station, on my knees until the concrete bruises my bones, until my whole body shakes with dead cold, until I know what martyrs are. Utopia in
A.D. 79 Exotic Greek names I am told are inscribed in the walls of the Latrine. Voluptuous prostitutes
enjoyed chiseling fame in their minds. So I imagine the dark
rough voices of Athena, Aphrodite, and Leda because these are the Greek women I know.
The prices there were very low for the lowest levels of society and slaves. I smell the bread baking warmly in the Pistrinum of the Vicolo
Torto even though the walls are half height now and there is no bread. The Stabian Baths separated the men and
women but they were joined again in the pool along the streets of sin. Venus’s veil is blown out by the wind as she reclines on a shell, nude and
bejeweled. And there’s Priapus, weighing his huge
phallus against a bag full of money on the other
side. These folks knew how to have fun. I
wonder if they felt movement from above or below and if they scurried for one last fling or if this thing caught them completely
by surprise freezing the taste of ash in their mouths and their expressions of horror to haunt us forever. The Girls in
the Family We had a chin-up bar in the backyard and a punching bag in the basement and a basketball court behind the garage. We played “21” and “One-on-One” on that patio that boasted garbage pails and a net against a tree dead center. We had no time for dolls, my sister and
me because we were busy playing kickball in the street with our brothers and neighbors who rode motorcycles and went to jail. My father would say I exaggerate. That we had all the grace and charm of little girls, but I know that the old women on my brothers’ paper routes saw my John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever haircut and smiled at the little boy. |