Vinni Marie D'Ambrosio, Ph.D. |
Poet/Scholar |
by Vinni Marie D'Ambrosio, in Rattapallax and Le Pagine (Rome), tr. Luigi Bonaffini |
The Consolation in Being History
". . . quarried long ago in the haze/ of an Italian morning . . . ."
I. Winter
Then slowly turning unplayful, my mother's days were nearly still, becoming a frieze,
each abutting a long file of earlier days, and paling more the more recent.
In the last of the line of them, she breathed such thin breathing onto her merest memories -
of a red (the satin on a candybox lid), a green (the lake lying under the trees), a purple (the dusk fallen between her daughters)
that they bleached away also.
II. Spring
Sister's door, brother's door, locked shut.
Mother's door, father's door, grass plots.
III. Autumn
With nowhere at all to place love, I watched mummers in a darkened barn on the straw hat circuit.
They were kind, were in a dumb show: they looped themselves, braided air, caressed a knee, lifted a wrist.
At the end, the music of flute stretched and collapsed like a barber's strop, and the footlights dimmed
to blue and seemed the distant heaven that is ever greedy for those we once have kissed.
IV. Winter
Wrapped in family silence, I look at the February sea
until it seems the black marble of tombs - miles wide and quarried long ago in the haze of an Italian morning, its rough planes surprised by the stonecutter.
On the morning of our mother's baptism, was it already in the making?
Who ordained it then, so black and heavy, to ride, an ocean on an ocean, to this Atlantic beach, to crash here and transmute,
becoming, as I look, a surface of Mediterranean prisms and Adriatic hushings? Minnows of light, love's whispers - one needs these.
V. Summer
My brother, of the U.S. Army, has come into town! He'll buy us a fish lunch
at the Rose Café, the fans will whirr sweetly over our heads, preserving in song his chopper's rescues,
the waiter will snap to,
and I will drink in the sunniness of the daisies in their stark vase. |
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