Given
I go by a name not mine but given to me
among mountains by Italian hosts impatient
with my own, its clash of consonant
coming to bear like sandpaper upon
the tongue. We’ll call you Lisa, they say
in a ceremony over dinner-cleaned dishes
and amaro made from black walnuts
like those I gathered just two days before
my hands still black from each shell cracked
I am anointed from nailbed to palm, the stain
in some spots deep as a vein. Lisa é meglio,
they say, not knowing I’ve been baptized
here with the name of my mother. In the time
of my old name, all we shared was the lone L
looping us together like a half-willing knot.
The L I clung to, one part of my designation
I thought I could claim. The rest — cobbled
letters malformed from their voice — I shed
in the dirt caked around sock and ankle bone,
pressed to essence like rain-packed leaf litter
piled thick along rows of fragrant tomato plants.
I am the L and everything after. The language
and lilt, the music. The part of myself
I most wanted to lose, let go at last
like a flake of hay carried off, confirming
the direction and drag of the day’s wind
as we ready a brush pile for burning.
◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆
After Some Words Scrawled on a Bathroom Stall
Change is a holy wailing beast
so let me be the season in its path,
the river rising to window,
the mud caught up in torrent.
I am bitumen swamp and spruce
beaconed in spring like bombs
at rest. Drinker of rain and peat,
maker of my own carbon belch,
my smoke always a portent
of someone else’s trouble.
Observe the steady grace
of a surface controlled by furious
spinning core, millennia-old
mountains melted down to tar.
I have walked over quakes
and calmed myself, camera in hand
to return with proof of life.
My mother views the photos,
says she just can’t see what all
the fuss is about. It’s hard
not to look at every step as a lunge.
My heart wears three repeating
stripes capped by a rattle, sheds
every so often a bright skin
too thin to signal its true shape.
What bloodline will deny me,
which extinction disrupts this feasting?
Science silenced is a padded tomb
awaiting the wake of what we know.
Progress is a martyr carrying mirrors.
Love is a simple object navigating
blurry physics, an ark baring its hull
to flood, remaining afloat. I am
soaked smoke sloshing along
the deck for something to hold.
I forget. I want to be the warning
and the whistle. So let this proximity
to an end be largesse for the damned —
scores of us drifting room to room
in search of the howling alarm.