~*~
The Music Box
(Sorrento)
I go out searching
like a lost earring
like one ear listening.
Swept, like exhaust, through a linear pipe,
like smoke stacked sideways,
I boarded the avian flight
flown
faster than the time of my place,
to a foreign city, a foreign language,
by shopkeepers’ cobblestone alleys,
I found inlaid wooden boxes
just like the one you gave me.
You see how the world speaks – You
in plate glass windows
reflection
spurning.
I might have been absent
when you came to your birthplace.
Earrings
on birdlike morsels
dropped behind bureaus
or hindered in laundered pockets
swept up with the cat dust of kitchens.
I could scrub on my knees like a penitent.
Snatched up from darkened crevices,
crumbled through black masks of palm,
the dark cheek absent-mindedly combed, a
mist
occluded
the mountainous face
settled in sides, in the trough holes,
stone veining.
In the runoff,
I make
us – a memorial.
Threading the vetch untangled,
I mud-press the roots
of purple.
I saw the pieta.
It shone, so lifeless.
***
On a sidewalk, in Rome, on an incline,
a skirt sprawled, a shawl listing
toward the footpath,
a can, open for alms.
I was moved
by the absence of your eyes. I walked on
home, to beggars never called that,
rude stares and outstretched palms.
Why do you take cover?
----
I run the flat escalator.
Late. Catching up, flying backward,
recouping my hours
I stand in the room of my family,
a constant skeptic,
regarding a scene of Sorrento.
I pick up your gift then.
And question the bottom,
“O Solo Mio,” “Made in Italy.”
My euros
laid in your musical tome
whistle through foreign alms, my crippled blooms
into the arms of night falls,
pitchers,
pouring,
the glass sweating heavily,
the sea rushes over our clam beds,
raking up all our mussels.
The diggers
climb
the banks
with their claws,
their iron rakes dangling.
The mute carried in baskets
to back door kitchens,
dropped into pots, steaming open,
shelled,
dripping
I have slept in lead,
in tin and cans,
a wake flown into
the golden piped fleece;
or pinched between pinned cushions,
(in arms and vulnerable).
.
I saw your gift on many tables
in the country of their origin.
The dark-scarved women move mutely
down alleys to high noon clanging.
The waiters, attending, bow whipping
the cloth, crumbs garnered, ruffled,
the inlaid wood wound open,
pulse of leaving,
opera of the lost post,
or red Venetian,
half-hinged,
seraphic,
pale crescent
seeps through
the honeycombed,
waxy, repining,
on polished walnut,
entrata:
inside - tinkling metallic,
through glass – cavernous,
the black half-hatch,
sieve for a pin-pricked metal
in a moth-eaten cloak,
ballast burst through
* *
the shotgun spread
* radiant
light
I’m missing
You
~*~