By involving fiber
in my invocation
of divinity,
I feel assured
of a fairly positive outcome.
How to Love Your Neighbor
All of them. Not just the morning shoppers,
the man who walks his chortling dog, the couples
with strawberry children. These are the given.
Announce your rebel kindness in letters painted
much too large on the back of your jacket. Children
will stare, dogs bark. Doors bolt. Anyway, walk.
Your shoes will wear out, and then your knees.
You will feel the cold’s every angle, the want of rain,
a drought of blessings. Your vanished face.
Close by, behind dust-colored curtains, a woman
wrapping her hijab—girding herself for the street
of this day—will call to her husband: Come see.
These two will kneel at their window.
Mercy wears lightning bolts on her shoulder. Threads
of fire in her white hair. The face of the sun.
How to Be Hopeful
Look, you might as well know,
this device is going to take endless repair:
rubber cement, rubber bands, tapioca,
the square of the hypotenuse,
nineteenth-century novels, sunrise—
any of these could be useful. Also feathers.
The ignition is tricky. Sometimes
you have to stand on an incline
where things look possible. Or a line
you drew yourself. Or the grocery line,
making faces at a toddler, secretly,
over his mother’s shoulder.
You may have to pop the clutch
and run past the evidence. Past everyone
who is praying for you. Passing
all previous records is ok, or passing
strange. Just not passing it up.
Or park it and fly by the seat of your pants.
With nothing in the bank, you will
still want to take the express. Tiptoe
past the dogs of the apocalypse
asleep in the shade of your future.
Pay at the window. You’ll be surprised:
you can pass off hope like a bad check.
You still have time, that’s the thing.
To make it good.
2
Pellegrinaggio
I. Pellegrinaggio
At the end of the long bowling alley lane
of a transatlantic flight, we crash and topple
like pins in the back of a Roman taxi.
Split or spare, hard to say what we are but
family, piled across one another: husband
and wife, our two daughters, his mother
Giovanna who has waited eighty years
to see what she’s made of.
Her parents, flung out from here like messages
in bottles, washed up on a new shore and grew
together. Grew celery for the Americans. Grew this
daughter who walked to school, sewed a new
cut of skirt, and became the small interpreter
for a family. They took her at her word but stamped
a map called home on a life she believed would end
before she could ever come here to find it.
What other gift could we give her? But now our taxi
crawls like a green bottlefly through the ear canals
of a city, it is half-past something I can’t stand
one more minute of, and I wonder what we were
thinking. We all might die before we find a place
to lie in this bed we’ve made for her. Beside me
she sits upright, mast of our log-pile ship in this bottle.
Made of everything that has brought us this far.
II. The Roman Circus
Navigating the tram:
Do not mount the car without a ticket.
Your ticket must be purchased
within the car.
Exchanging traveler’s checks:
Go to the Spanish Steps! everyone agrees, for there
(and nowhere else) officials will accept our deficient
currency and throw baskets of money upon us.
The Spanish Steps:
Excuse the inconvenience as
the American Express is closed.
The Pantheon:
Do not doubt that a yogurt-flavored gelato
could be unparalleled in civilized human experience.
Or the fig, as a close second.
Trevi Fountain:
Elbow yourself into the crowd
to guarantee another journey here, more elbows,
more chances, one more coin.
III. On the Piazza
Through the scent of grilled fish
a tarantella rises from the boy
in tattered jeans but startling shoes—
formal, black, perfectly polished—
who plays his violin as if this
teeming plaza were Carnegie Hall
and his shoes, in that case, correct.
We drink Chianti and keep an eye
on the sweet-talking boys who cruise
like sleek reef fish, slip bracelets
onto our daughters’ pretty wrists:
One euro, or your phone number.
Jugglers stab at the darkness
with flaming knives or the modern
electric equivalent. But the one who’s
got me is the tall masked pharaoh
in a gold drape who stands
immobile on a box, hour upon
hour, his statuesque illusion
a frozen, untouched island
in the churning human torrent,
except for his silent, folded bow
when a coin is dropped at his feet.
Later, relief arrives. The pharaoh
wriggles free of his gilded cocoon—
the metamorphosis—and his brother
crawls in to take his shift. I imagine
their small apartment shared with
other immigrants from an African
village of emptied-out fields,
the intimacy of these two brothers
living mostly just the one life now
on Piazza Navona inside a golden sheet.
IV. Into the Abruzzo
Vomipeligna, the kids will later
name this. Car pulled over
onto the grassy verge of a much-too-
winding road, the pale among us helping
the ones beyond it. How quickly
a roving family may find togetherness.
We are trying to find our way back
to the motherland. For air I wander into
a field and find wild peonies blooming.
Dancing, madly fragrant. Who knew
the portly bouquets of Memorial Days
hailed from such winsome hay-haired kin?
Here to remind me of graveyards
and surprising sites of origin.
A mountain that holds us to its secrets.
These feral granite ranges gave the world
children, the mother of my mother-in-law,
her son, our family, and peonies.
V. In Torricella, Finding Her Mother’s House
Here is the church. Mamma went
every day, not just to pray but to sing.
The boys dropped spiders on the girls
from the balcony. One of the boys, she liked.
Here is the house beside the church
where the lawyer lived. He was rich.
Mamma came every morning
to help the lawyer’s wife dress
and comb her long hair, to earn a coin.
Six doors down, here is the house
where she lived. Where her papa died.
Wher
e they had nothing. Out of this door
they went, she and her sister as children.
They stood on this step to say goodbye.
A stagecoach to Naples, from there a ship,
to live with the cousin in Denver who
had a tavern. Girls could work there.
They didn’t know the cousin. Here is
the graveyard where she saw her papa
buried, the doorstep where she kissed
the mamma she would never see again.
Over the ocean to make her way,
it started here.
Look at this view.
Why did she never tell me it was
beautiful here? Never speak of so much,
so much she left behind.
VI. Circumnavigating Torricella Peligna
Giovanna wants to know
what there is to know about
this mountain. Anything her mother
might have seen if she walked
downhill. Expecting not a lot, we
drive through towns, each smaller
than the one before. A church,
a fountain. The town band on
the square, all the young faces
behind the bright blossoming bells
of their instruments, the pollen
drift of their music. The pozzo
where cold water wells up
from the stone heart of the land.
A trattoria, a waiter who somehow
sees everything, famiglia. Asks
younger guests to move so she
will have the best view. Tells our
girls their nonna is an encyclopedia.
They should read her every day.
We watch clouds tease like a veil
across the forested bluffs, but she is
watching the mountain, her true north.
VII. Pompeii
It’s terrible, but we want to know
all about the unfortunates caught flat
when the mountain blew. We’ve read the
firsthand account by Pliny the Younger,
imagined the bay clogged with pumice,
the screamers running around with
pillows clasped to their heads. Now
in the streets of their city we step high
on great stone crosswalks designed
for simultaneous passage of wagon wheels,
pedestrians, and sewage. We admire
the murals in their villas (in vogue then: red,
and Egypt). Eager voyeurs, we drink it in
like those doomed souls lined up
at the taverns with their jugs. We visit
the brothel and then the stadium with
perfect acoustics that make us sing.
Saved for last, the Garden of Fugitives,
where mothers clung to their children
behind the high wall, clawing for escape.
Fossilized on their upturned faces we see
the belief that anyone would recognize:
in one more minute we will breathe again.
As people do, we’ve come looking
for proof that the dead of the past were just
like us. And grow quiet, having found it.
VIII. At the Top of Mount Vesuvius
The view from here—
down flower-bronzed slopes
to the apron of cities from Naples
to Sorrento—is one long allowance
of habitation along the bay.
How many lives have hugged this sea,
how many eyes lifted to this crater
wondering when she might throw
her next fit of boiling lava?
Puddled mounds like cow dung
reveal themselves to be buried towns.
A fringe of steam leaks from the crater’s
smile. Her breath has notes of sulfur.
But underneath this fine flat pledge of sky
the sea is calm. The blood-red roofs.
Even the newest houses, bone-colored,
and the many more under construction.
The view from here reaches backward
into centuries; from down there forward only
as far as half-past tomorrow.
IX. Swimming in the Bay of Naples
You float. I am not kidding.
Your own shocking toes rise up
to let you know. This is not
like the cloying dark ponds of
childhood, or the college pool
where my lank leaden frame
angled down and down beneath
the bluster of the swimming
instructor who insisted I would
float if I just applied myself.
How could I know? I had only
to acquire an Italian family
and follow it here to this sweetly
salted sea like a fat featherbed
where a body can lie in repose
considering the successes
of civilized people. Never mind
what’s below, the real estate
of old shipwrecks. I will stay
up here. Now that I know the secret.
X. On the Train to Sicily
In a family compartment we take the long
ride south, down the coast and across the channel
to the patria of her father. She is so tired.
We’ve lifted her onto the sill of this urbane clatter,
tucked ourselves in a cupboard of relative
peace, but now her small frame finds no resting
place on the great square seats. We offer
pillows, sips of water. She only says, Don’t worry.
Panoramas pass in dramatic excess: castles,
vineyards, splendidly pointed mountains cloaked
in olive trees. We feel abashed for these
wonders, but worry that we’ve dragged her bones
through too many stations of this cross.
The unstoppable rhythm of filial love pulls us on
and on along its track. South of Cetraro
our cupboard is invaded: a girl. Deep blue hair
drawn low across her brow like a wartime
blackout curtain. Inked with skulls and crossbones
to her knuckles, dark eyes resting loose
on the air overhead. She ignores us.
We rock in a silent tedium of mutual discomfort,
willing this suddenly scrambled nest into something
whole again, when the ring of her mobile
snaps her into focus, window flung wide: Ciao, Mamma!
XI. Monreale
My grandmother came here just once.
People rarely traveled in those days,
she tells us, as we navigate the twisting
approach, steering wheel arm over elbow,
not far outside Palermo but what a road.
She spoke of it for the rest of her life.
She had never seen anything like it.
Afterward we grow talkative with
our marvel at the cathedral, its golden
mosaics and honeycombed ceiling,
chatter about the different kinds of
beauty, our good luck at seeing
a wedding party arrive, that dress
of hers. The white Rolls-Royce
parked in front! Our marvel wanders.
Giovanna in the back seat closes her eyes:
I’m going to be quiet now
and think about my grandmother.
XII. Lemon-Orchard Blue
The language has its words
for blue—azzurro, blu, ciano—
and it could use some more.
Tranquil sea, tormented sea,
shallow and deep, stormy but stippled
with light, a blue where anything
could be hiding behind an alibi
of sepia ink. And this does not begin
to address the sky: glazed
like a Moorish
tile, or furtive
as a memory of Vesuvius.
Innocent as a twenty-cent postcard.
These are the sturdy blues
that stand in line for an eye to call out.
Others wait behind them: the blue,
for instance, that was always here
stretched tight as a laundered sheet
above the orchard where a point-eared dog
stalks his lizard and the lemon trees
bend their arms, whitewashed to the elbow,
pushing flat bouquets of leaves
against heaven, the wheeling swallows,
and one season’s ration of cloud.
XIII. The Road to Erice Is Paved with Intentions
My mother-in-law, as she puts it, has intentions.
Advice from a priest to carry a heart
past unbearable losses, a husband and daughter,
and strike its path through one more day:
Get up and make intentions.
I intend to call a friend on the phone.
I intend to notice the flowers in the yard.
It cannot be easy to be this old, with a heart
tugged by loss and a family’s interventions
across the stones of Sicily. But on we go, I declare
the plan for our day: we will drive to Erice.
Picture us up there gazing down at the water,
across the blue southern seas. If the day
is fine, I intend for us to see all the way to Rome.
Erice has other intentions, remains a hard
medieval gleam on the mountaintop—shaved
white scoop of vanilla ice on a tall volcanic cone.
It melts as we lurch and falter up the winding trace
where so many men try to stop us. First, a scare
with a flagman, next the funicular man, and then
the carabinieri. But I am intent: we slip by.
At a roadblock, we are forced to park the car.
Boldly I link my arm through hers and declare
to all men gathered there, “I’ve brought her
this far. We are going to walk to Erice.” They wave
and waggle their heads as if we are Verdi’s demented
foreign witches. But she and I with heads held high
march past their barricade. And that is when
they start screaming, “Una gara!” With the rising roar
it dawns: gara, garage, holy mother, an auto race.
Flung to the ditch, our hearts surpassing all known