Amelia dell'Umbria

12/10/15

i used to write long poems in which anything could happen,
love as sick as love.
though always it felt inevitable.

though it broke me.
there are lentils on the high apennine plateau
whose flowers i have not seen.
though i saw the mountains in the distance
from a car window
as we drove out of terni.

is it sane to go
that close to someone
and if not

is sanity worth it.

but it broke you, madeleine.
i walked alone down through the city
out the great stone doors of the porta romana,
aspettando qualcuno.
an old man in the park found my bare thigh,
put his hand there.

i had come from the golden cathedral, 

one of many i found empty at the crowns of cities and entered
alone.

sei bella, he said,
which meant whore in any language.

Sounding

10.21.15

It does at last slow,
strict crush of nights into
abrupt mornings, fight
for breath in that chest, in that head—

it does slow—
and open—

In my body, the dense gold knot of it
stumbles randomly against things,
making my hands move, pressing
my tongue into complex phonemes.

Sick with it—
sicker now than I have ever    ever
been—

I am certain—

Longing so rich it has to blur.
Cracks in wild milkweed pods
from which parachutes spill.
The arch where the woods open to a clearing
where the air
buckles like a heat mirage.
The thing I meant to say and then

the wind picked up and covered all words,
all need for words,
and my body spoke without them.

Signals, part 2

9.15.15

(part 1)

months pass mouths
pass months.
where was I that the night
was humid, that it shimmered
unchecked?

oh, it forgets itself,
ben svegliata-
every bloom
stirs for a signal.

     flowers whisper by the pond
     all night, we cross them
     on our cold walk home,
     the walk on which my legs
haven't stopped trembling.

what is surrender?
not thinking about it,
we tell time by our bodies,
     or time tells our bodies,
             or neither:
time races by
unchecked.  and from nowhere
it's near morning.

Kiss

7.26.15

let the day pass.
the next day, take dawn.  with your hands

find scrubby blueberry
out on the wild hill.  early

enough the salt breeze is bare,
the heart in the chest pulls and twists.
let it, meet a woman and her dog on the bluff.

can you live alongside the living
creatures today, can you
allow yourself
that love.

In arrival

7.11.15

Como

The brakes' lurch
wakes me.  I can't sleep
where I'm meant to this week.
White sheets aglow

wrap gold men in the near bunks.
Rhythm of time hums
urgent near the precipice.
The old world where I've been captive,

was captive,
looms.

     Then the tender baritone of the Trenitalia robot
comes like rain, I know every word,

in arrivo,
every nuance of translation.

The day I left home, the first lilac
burst in the front yard.  At last!
They are always a brief magic.
I ran to it, anguished—

how unfair, only the day.

Il Tuono

Vetralla

Pinta the dog cowers to my calves.
Cloud shadow leans
over tomatoes in their neat cane rows.
Mauro and I gave hours,
and plead against hail.

San Giovanni

Vetralla

Donkeys stir in the last mist.
A jar each,
Federico and I hike through hazelnuts
to the Etruscan tombs.
Some yellow flowers appear.
Singing quiet Frank Ocean
as a breach, I wind my wrists through grass.
Blooms smear pollen
where my fingers crease.
Federico's hand spread on my back
holds me when I climb,
too high maybe, to pick the final few.

The Hot Hours

6.7.15

Viterbo

Reduced to tiny thirsty dunes
raised red where somehow painless
they punctured.
Zanzare, aragne, climbers
from little dirt structures I disturbed
to tug lamb's-quarters from spiral zucchini.
        Chugging resounds from the cistern.
Between water, hot briefly from pipes in sun
weaning fresh sluices of dirt and some blood
from my legs, I want it to pound.

Left clean to drape indoors and wait,
white curtains drawn as seams to stay
the heat, all afternoon.  My fingers
hover over spots to gnaw.
My ankles lose their skin.

Lumaca

Villa Borghese, Roma

On the packed metro, I hide my hands,
dirt under the nails,
fine calcium particles
from the crushed shells of landsnails I've pulled
all week from fava leaves
and thrown overhand to wilder
parts of the field.

No fields, but shade by the aranceria,
and the artificial lake 
glimmers under lazy rowers.
Here, regularly, men
in fitted business clothes
sleep on benches midday.
Were I not who I am,
I could lay, stick, un-
curl; words to indicate
more than survival

now is possible.

Instead of sleep, a sandwich
wrapped in white paper.
Roman men don't look away 
when you stare back.
I wish I had something
to cover my shoulders.
All afternoon, European sirens wail.

Since winter

4.6.15

I've developed the kind of body that looks strong.
People glance at me and think she means it.
I still read my ex-girlfriend's sign
in horoscopes.
This week, let yourself bloom.
The first crocus is purple.
I used to wear this plain purple dress that she loved

for the way it could be lifted.
This spring there's someone I'm trying not to want,
which is a good story.
When his body's close, I see the jagged
silhouettes of palm trees,
night lightning without rain.

Abdomen, anterior forearm,
latissimus dorsi.

After the seder,
after the long drive home
through fog, I sit on my bedroom floor
and smooth dust from the flat tongues
of orchid leaves.
It was cold,
and still barely is not.

Seasonal memory

2.8.15

I can't now enter the sensation
of loving you, but know it was all-consuming.
Towards spring, there was almost a hate to it.

There are many steps I do not
remember.  But some: the October
we made a sort of bed on your floor
with your parents' cotton blankets
it became so hot in the small room     some nights  
we slept with the window open.
And it was October!
            In Connecticut!

     I imagine you never think about this.
I imagine you've written over the story
and I wonder at it, your functioning,

your whole mechanism.
Outside of time I remember your hands

inside me, the room in flames.

Literally:
a pile of your shirts fell into a candle one winter.

We didn't notice until
I coughed on the smoke.

I miss you

1.29.15

The snow that was supposed to be a burying
is a light thing, already diminished.
Ice in the gutter melts in hard drops.
The sound through the wall wakes me where
I'm sleeping sick in my sister's bed,
and first I think it's a woodpecker.

And then body pain keeps me awake
for a long time.  I remember a dream
in which I hiked up through an orchard
with my mother as it got dark.
I didn't know what fruit, and was barefoot,
which I could feel all the way to my stomach.

It was not because of thorns,
or any sharpness.
Poetry for me is the fight to explain
what I could feel then, and why.
But short months
fly.  I write nothing.

Poem one

1.3.15

Flowers wake me, still drunk,
in the middle of the night.
Dizzy, I smell them in every direction.
Real flowers, not sickly sweet.
On my back, spine, hamstrings,
calves.  Tingling.  It's usually my custom
to tell you about the dream I woke from, a real dream
this time, rich with the kind of detail
I would only ever choose flowers over.
But it's early in the year.  I'm writing
just to write, dreaming to dream.
Later I'll tell you.  Later,
when it means something.