There is coffee to be washed
from the bottom of cups,
Floors to be washed,
laundry to be done,
essays and invoices to be written.
The sky is still dark.
Morning’s coffee with sugar and whole milk;
I am fattening on your absence.
*
Category: Life In Italy
The Glassmen: by Bonnie McClellan
The glassmen run reconnaissance
like fluorescent-vested spiders
through the web of night streets;
lacing the village tightly
from downhill church to up.
Dawn crashing they come
green reflections
of wined evenings upended
echoing through the fog.
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Piedmont: by Bonnie McClellan
Nude summer feet
on sheepish boulders falling,
……….through peasant ices’ glacial tread
floe following light, tripping
roll, down running fleet
……….biting toes with
………………..ever-glancing snows
………………………..green-moistened lisp.
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Impending: by Bonnie McClellan
We awake to the muffled chaff of rain
as the grey down of clouds roundly tussle
for the pleasure of concealing dawn.
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Bardiglio
mineral time crushed into
kitchen counter
grey slab of bardiglio
shard/scarto/scarred
the knife-blade print
the oil stain
the lemon that left
a star-shaped etching
compressed calcium
soft grey
just cooler
than a dove’s back
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Monte Reale/Mason’s Eucherist: by Bonnie McClellan
MON REALE / MASON’S EUCHERIST
Tourists take photos while the faithful take communion.
The priest extends God
again and again.
within the cardboard flavoured
benediction of holy bread
He Is
reconstituted by faiths’ sanguine tongue.
The exchange of force:
the weighted wheel that rights itself
the pendelum
the cam shaft
the finger on the shutter button:
charged reflex of the aperture flash-writes the icons’ golden tesserae
to memory
again and again.
Monday, in the winding weekday of a suburban street:
The bread man drives a panel truck
newgreen once, now filmed with summer dust cast up from the road
innocent as the first stones that years ago
smacked off enamel chips and so
engendered oxides’ ruddy rose.
Chanting through the nasal static of a loud speaker
unintelligible words.
His rough square hands convey
in paper, through which butter has begun to soak,
delicate pastry filled with almond paste and dark chocolate
lightly dusted with powdered sugar, and then:
two swallows of thick, black coffee,
in a plastic dixie cup.
The 10 a.m. taste of salvation
again delivered to working men.
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cloud table:inter prestation
.
.
.
.
light-bearing months; burnt out, used up, exhausted, passed by
heavy grey clouds twisting, cajoling, traveling along the route of back-lit, illuminated, golden-edged time
passed, exhausted, used up, burnt out; visual border between heaven and earth compensated, forfeit.
.
.
.
.
inter: put into the earth
prestation: the obligation to perform or not perform a duty
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cloud table:spent time
.
.
.
luminous season, spent
grey omnibus’ ply limned time
spent, horizons paid.
.
.
.
.
.
.
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Caulonian Suite: IV. Venerdi Santo / Good Friday
Venerdi Santo,
Cristo morirà ancora
come ha fatto ogni anno
poichè Dio sa quando.*
—-
They held a New Orleans Funeral for Jesus:
Woodwinds, brass and the big bass drum.
After awhile the rain began to come;
Parishioners popped up their umbrellas,
Madonna was sacked to protect the stars
Spangling perfect electrified hair that
Should have been disheveled in grief.
Christ: unable to awaken, trapped in an opiate nightmare,
Pallid, couch-ridden, sick with flowers,
Widow-borne through the streets on a lacy bier.
Mary: politely dolorosa, her face more composed than that
Of the old mother dressed in black
Hanging out of the window to watch Her pass,
Baptizing the parading crowd with tears
Thrown out like old wash water.
What is left clean and what is soiled?
The sorrow of sin shifts from house to street
To be tracked back in on the slack-shod feet
Of grandchildren, dogs and beggared questions,
Salved in the last moment with words and oil:
quidquid deliquisti / in all that you have failed.
***********************************
*Good Friday,
Christ will die again
As he’s done every year
Since God knows when.
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Calabrian Chronicles: The Ovile of Mimmo and Peppe – The Final Chapter
Dear readers, this short story has been published in 3 parts, if you’ve missed the first bits, they can be found at the following links:
The Ovile of Mimmo and Peppe (part 1)
The Ovile of Mimmo and Peppe (part 2)
ATTENTION: This is not truly a story about a toddlers encounter with real farm animals or about expatriate Americans having an “Under the Tuscan Sun” experience. It is a story that extends forward and backward from the vanishing point of a life, the life of a baby goat. This is also not a story about how terrible it is to kill and eat animals: in this place, butchering a goat for Easter is like picking an orange, an ordinary part of life. These shepherds are kind to and value their animals for what they are – their livelihood. If you are squeamish about the idea of a goat being butchered, stop reading when you get to the picture of the heard of goats.
It has taken me four years to finish this story. The memory so visceral and the series of sensations so complex that it has resisted my every effort to make it into a comprehensible story or a poem as I have those things from Serra San Bruno or from inside the city walls. This is a liminal place, on the border between the named place – the city – and the lush density of the landscape as it thickens in a following line towards the sea.
A rooster crows, where is the sound coming from? Robin wants to find it. We wander and talk, Matthew’s work day will start soon, we put our feet on the path to go up, to say thank you and goodbye. The three men stand on the side porch. Peppe holds his hand up in warning, his whole body says don’t let the child see: Gianni has brought the stranger to buy a kid, they are slaughtering it, for Easter.
Peppe is an able butcher and there is not even a bleat. I turn with my child on my hip, my arm between her gaze and the house; I point out to her something on the opposite horizon. I look down and the whey in the gully is mixing with blood. Who would have thought such a tiny thing held so much? When do you explain this to a child…with our language that so neatly separates the words used for meat and those used for animals? We walk, gesturing and talking always pointing Robin’s attention away from the trussed and headless goat on the porch. I look back. It’s skin now hangs down in a tidy rope from the pallid, marbling of meat, veiled with the translucent tissue that keeps it all compact – lubricating the movement between skin and muscle – meat that is still anchored to hoof, hoof that is still tied to a rope slung over the porch’s lintel beam.
They’re hosing down the concrete in front, the dog that had been drinking a bucket of whey pokes his white muzzle down into the gully to lap at the water tinged with milk and blood. Walking back to my van I see the coursing streamlet of whey and blood as it mixes with the almost motionless trickle of shit and urine running under the passenger-side front tire. It flows across the dirt road and into a hillside so full of green that it looks like Eden – will the ground soak it all up, all of this nitrogen and potassium, everything good for making verdant things stronger?
I am nauseous, not simply from the death – all of my senses are too full: baby goats like ballet dancers, the thick scent of manure, the widening red streamlet coursing cheerfully through the green hillside and the little bucket of creamy cheese in my hand. The ancientness of the act dizzyingly dissonant with the shininess of the cars, the space-age plastic of my shoes. I look up.
The sick dog lies on a warm patch of grass.
The healthy dog that is tied up ignores his tithe: a fluorescent red round of bone taken from the freshly slaughtered goat that still hangs from the lintel.
A consecutive flow of fluids convene into a single flow: whey/blood/water from the place of men – water/urine/feces from where men keep the animals.
In the flow that reaches the bottom of the path in this moment, the color of blood predominates.
Behind the ovile rises the hillside full of breccia – the eroded face of rock worn away by the river far below, flowing towards the Ionian sea.
This moment collapses inward and dilates outward: a vanishing point.
From the house there is now a flow of clear water, washing everything clean.
Bonnie McClellan-Broussard 