Abstract
These poems are a representation of the early life of my paternal grandfather, a reluctant immigrant from Sicily. I am emboldened and inspired by H. L. Goodall’s writings on the (secret) life of his father, and the toxicity and disorientation of family secrets as well as Laurel Richardson’s description of using poetic inquiry to “concretize emotions, feelings and moods – the most private kinds of feelings, so as to creative experience itself to another person”.
“Il pecato nascosto mezzo perdonato”
(The sin which is hidden his half forgiven)
Sicilian proverb
“I guai della pigniata sabe sol’ o cucchiao”
(The troubles deep in the pot are known only by the spoon)
Sicilian proverb
These poems (re) imagine the life of my grandfather, an inscrutable man with an often-brutal outlook toward life, in general, and to his family, in particular. Because I sensed something not quite right with him for my entire life, many years ago, I began digging into his past, which of course, was my family’s collective past. What I found was an astonishing array of (open) secrets that my father and his siblings were ignorant of, but that so many others knew, including our original family name. While I have tried to understand the man, who died in 1995, I never could. He was always shifting and changing, a ghost in life as in death. What I have gleaned from his early life, I have attempted to represent here through a lens of honesty, long lacking in the narrative of our family. Inherent in the secrets about my grandfather that were kept by those who knew him so well, friends as well as foes, is the inherent “conspiracy of silence” a hallmark of the Italian and Italian American psyche, where to tell of family business or affairs is a betrayal of the worst kind, an offence that could place you outside of the (loving but often intractable) family fold. This is one representation, though I am quite certain there could be countless others.
Pugno di Ferro 1
Two years after
the famous Messina earthquake
your parents conceived you
in the shadow of terror and loss.
The capricious hand of the
Catholic God had turned their
small mean lives over.
Mistrust, thus finds
fertile ground,
attaches itself like gold
links to the intricate
chain of DNA. Sociopaths,
the maudlin, the easily excitable
Are born in the cold shadow of
lack and want.
Mothers smile, nonetheless.
The fetus in the rock hard belly
is already poised, his mandate set.
This is what we imagine:
you raised your tiny, wrinkled
pugno di ferro. The townspeople
upon your birth, blow kisses that
both scorch and freeze the cheeks
on which they land. When you arrive
it is due, in part, they say, to your
jagged teeth with which you ate your
way out, dripping with blood
Already planning a way to survive.
Trinacria 2
Bird the island with the naked
eye and you come upon
the rare, the accidental,
the vulnerable, the extirpated.
The island didn’t give any one
a chance then. Doesn’t now, either.
Beaks, sharp as the points of knives, strike before
before being struck. It is our way.
By mountain, my sea
O mare, O mare 3
Nature has a passion for
erasure, for subjugation,
for keeping the powerful unbowed.
For survival, while feeding yourself
With one hand, you deny your
mother’s love, look askance
at your father’s sad smile,
with a fierce, but quiet disdain.
Walk the sun-baked estate with impunity.
Strada Dell Oblio 4
Your mother’s fingers
like the brown smooth,
brown shells of hazelnuts
pluck the uva 5 from gnarled
and twisted branches.
She is as dark as a nut, smells
as musty as earth. She loads the
crop into the wheelbarrow that is
thick with the rust that
smells like blood when it rains.
In the market, the men
will finger the swollen globules
and dream of stomping them,
with their bare feet.
You smoke, slowly, and
listen to your mother
plead to the men,
now, now, now
because the sun is so hot,
And the uva so ripe,
everyone’s stomach so empty.
But you wait until she begins to cry,
the tilt of your cap casting a long shadow
she stands in, small shoulders heaving.
She is far behind you.
Mussolini Came in on a Horse
Revolutions can be sparked by insults.
Can you tell the difference between
the vulture and the buzzard?
The imperial eagle?
Tell a man that he needs
no more protection
than the one man standing
right in front of him
and then prepare for
what will surely follow.
Keep in line, ragazzi. 6
March with the upturned
thrust of your chin
Why you could be Il Duce’s
very own son. That jaw
will be said, years hence,
to be your only admirable
feature for generations.
Your revolver lay in a drawer
covered by your mother’s
linen bridal apron.
Just in case.
Mussolini came in on a horse,
and the people from the mountains
buried their rosaries in the dirt
And prayed, instead,
to his shiny black boots.
Ave Caesar! 7
Just in case came soon enough.
Near your death, that once
strong chin hung with shame
remembered the oath
recited so long ago
fulfilling all eventualities.
You closed the circle in the end.
Impegni 8
Because your father went ahead
it was inevitable that you would follow.
Only fate stepped in and hastened things a bit.
There are stories that you told,
stories your children will tell, but not
without the shame that acts as a preface.
If you are threatened, if your mothers has
a small gun held to her sun-warmed forehead,
her fragile home under siege, you will
stand up straight. Remove the smoldering cigarette
from the lush lips that dared
to press the lips of young village girls,
forever your weakness, and take
three steps forward.
Bags packed and the sign of the cross.
Your mother clicks her crooked teeth
twists her foot on terra ferma. 9
She binds herself to her son
and blinds herself to his deeds.
At sunrise you step across
the threshold of your ancestral home
Your mother looks for the sweat of your brow,
the shake of your hands, finds neither.
Dio, she says, as if it were a tragedy,
which it is, but she smiles.
The bodies are buried,
and forever you carry two lives
in your suitcase and leave the land you love.
Let the birds carry the evidence to the
three corners of your island,
fertilize the tragic land
for generations to come.
Palermo
At the dock you eye
The clothing of the contadini 10
and laugh, adjust the wide knot
in your tie and scan the crowd,
which is said to be either a
sign of shrewdness or fear.
Keep ahead of all loss. Start now.
At least you can stand proud,
even if you can’t stand tall.
You wonder what you will find in l’America. 11
The girls, the women you have heard about
in crude whispers from your friends and
wifeless uncles in the new country.
No one will be able to contain you.
While your father will work until
your mother puts him to bed at night
she will establish her new-found authority.
You will seek prey.
Learning the language
does not concern you.
Eventually, the words will come.
What you need most in the new world
can be taken with muscle, threat
and what you feel is
your God-given right in a land
you will stubbornly never call your own.
Interregnum
We barely know who we are
far from home. You were a baby
who never stopped crying, your fists
balled all white with fury and pain.
When your mother stuffed your mouth
with a rag dipped into sugar rare as gold flakes
you might as well have been suckled by a wolf.
Stopgap measures are temporary, but desire
steams ahead like a freight train, a tsunami wave,
raw down the back of your red throat.
Stop the back-story, lead the blind.
Who ever she may be,
she won’t stand a chance.
Your firmament is the blood
of survival and games of chance.
Your Mussolini souvenirs
collect dust on the shelves,
pique the curious and unknowing.
The Sin of Proximity
Desire can be directional or
can be prodded by proximity.
North or South, it doesn’t really matter.
If someone places something or someone
in your path, you will buy it
marry it or destroy it.
The equivalent of two tons of uva
from the old country will
buy you back your family’s respectability,
spring you from the iron bars
of 1000 filthy sins.
The birds who fly low
are easy prey.
To reach one simply walk
down the stoop steps and across
the street. Your mother will place
a sugary almond under her tongue until
your first child is born.
Not that one. The other one.
Your father, will spit out the
accumulating bile in his mouth
and get on with it.
Cognome 12
It is your fault that we
don’t know who we are.
For Christ’s sake,
pick a goddamn name
and stick to it.
Il Nodo Nostro 13
In the end, your mother
worried her rosary
hoping to trick a God she
never believed in anyway.
Safe passage for all.
Omertà, 14 the years and
the limits of respectability.
Tell me in all the ways you can,
in all the languages you can speak
with all the words that you know.
Stay. Leave.
Come. Go.
Either way, we will
give you any praise
we may have overlooked.
But really, only just.
Sorellina 15
Forever relegated to
To serrated edges of memory
Where what is real is obscured,
hidden. We imagine your mother in
her sensible shoes, the dress her
own mother ironed with care.
Brutal indifference and desire
like a thick fat wick
and then a life
like a butterfly pinned under glass.
At night, sometimes I whisper in
the dark “Come to us,” because old
though you are or dead you may be
how much we wanted to know you,
the one whose existence was denied
for so very long.
Still, unknown.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Notes
Author Biography
