Family Portraits by the Sea
Clad in linen, my gleeful mother scoots across wet sand
and broken shells to feel the froth of water on veined legs.
Her granddaughter surges like a dolphin through
the cresting waves. She is the guide who led
her to this place. I sit in a beach chair on the ridge,
stave a broken umbrella in the sand against
wind and sun, hunch to last till hunger calls.
I listen as their voices rise and break like egrets fishing.
My mother listens to our voices rise and break like egrets fishing
in the wind. The sun lasts, hunched as hunger calls.
Umbrella staves pierce like blowing sand. She
reads in her beach chair on the ridge where she led us.
She is our guide, clad in linen. I surge like a dolphin
through the cresting waves. My gleeful daughter
scoots across wet sand and broken shells, red
shovel in hand, to feel the froth of water on her legs.
Brief Taste of Heaven
The search is always the same.
Boots greet miles of dirt and roots,
dream of rest on a wide outcrop,
granite or limestone buffed by rain,
fissured by ice, ancient sea scoured.
Slice salami and cheese on a ledge
that resists age and suffering.
Lean back in a hollow–cool in high
summer, warm in the late autumn sun–
one heel hedged on a fin of raised stone.
Here on the Beaver River, for example,
at the head of a waterfall, a playground
of boulders to clamber over,
each with a new view of the churn,
the pines, the ripening woods and gray sky.
I coil gingerly into pigeon pose on a rock,
the slab indifferent to the press of my weight,
the ache of half-century muscles and joints.
Later, I float the currents of Henry James’
sentences, while the river, stealthy above,
fierce below, steals breath from birdsong,
mutes outrage and the pillage of the train
rattling to the refinery by the bay. We
are young even when our bones turn
brittle and bruises bloom on our skin.
The falls spray time on dimpled stone.
And the stone’s perspective?
Cartwheels of light through mist,
hurried sky, another human
storm gathering straight line winds.
White Landscape
I run with microspikes for the ice
where the trail is steep and exposed,
alone except for the occasional dog walker
trudging in his thick boots and coat
as the morning sun spills over the ridge.
We are at home any hour in the whiteness
and shadow of bristly snow-tufted cedar
bare spindly oak, bent prairie grass.
A pileated woodpecker tocks at the trunk
of a dead sycamore until it hears me
and stills, its red crown startling
against white sky and white bark. Its fear
lays quiet as rocks in the creek under snow.
The city bulges and sags with a brightness
that hurts if you stare–an old man
on stained sheets in a hospital bed
shimmering in harsh light. He shouts
about rights, demands dinner and a smile
from the nurses forced to work overtime.
The dog walkers and I nod beneath fleece
when we pass, beards threaded with crystals.
We are not hardy, or strong,
nor exceptionally intelligent—though
it is easy to get drunk on that draft,
loosen the tongue like one accustomed
to others listening. Ease comes from ease,
the habit of spikes on the ice, warm boots
in the snow, a well-stocked wood stove
waiting at home. Truth is
we have what it takes to feel safe
Sedimentary
(I.M. EGC, 10/16/2020)
1.
Friends call across the ocean to tell us
you died, Ester Gagliano Candela,
in the converted garage beside
the shuttered stucco villa
where your mother bunkers
in her dementia. They say
that when she heard the news
two tears slipped through
before she turned to her TV.
Sea breeze rustles dry palm leaves
in your father’s garden gone to seed.
You know precisely how earth lifts and buries.
2.
Thirty years ago, Ernesto, dapper
even in his garden clothes, gently
scolds the straining dogs as he
ushers us past cascades of oleander
and bougainvillea into the cool
shadows of your parent’s home, a comfortless
Victorian couch, coffee on a bright tile tray.
Lines in a newspaper brought us together.
Do you remember, Ester? Lemon, fig
and medlar branches strain
for the light that pierces your window.
Pecked fruit drops to rot in the yard
outside our gap-toothed garden doors.
There we huddle two damp winters,
except on weekends when we climb
black metal stairs to the heated flat
where you and Guendalina monitor
your daughter’s sullen adolescence.
Your friends, soon to be ours, enlighten
us to local curse, demand twisted
vowel sounds from our mouths:
Auminnini u bar a pigghiarini nu caffé.
Windows mist while the pasta boils
and when we laugh too long and loud,
fogging the view of Monte Pellegrino.
In your kitchen I learn to tease ink sacks
from cuttlefish, stuff them with tentacles
and breadcrumbs, set to simmer
in sauce the color of sky meets sea
when dark comes on. It is the year
they chunk the Berlin Wall, shifting
Italian plate tectonics we need
you, a geo-physicist, to explicate.
Ester, you extoll the wines of Alcamo,
a certain butcher’s stuffed rolled veal,
ricotta fresh from Piano degli Albanesi.
Doyenne of friendship, you lay bare
how a meal evokes past and future
gatherings, flora, fauna, magma,
forces we ride and sometimes cultivate.
I see, though I am not there, a pair
stooping to collect samples at dawn
on the gray slopes of Etna, the inky
slopes of Stromboli. You ignore any hint
we perceive you as a couple. Remember
that eggplant evening in Guendalina’s courtyard?
So many ways of taming bitterness—
tomato, salt, sugar, vinegar—
you tend grill, she flits from
the kitchen, and in between,
hot embers, tired smoke.
3.
One last conversation at your nephew’s
wedding, surrounded by the friends
you gifted us. Worn and thin as your failing
hair, dressed in a white sweater, you
shrug off questions about cancer,
fatigue, your mother’s erosion,
inevitable as the course of lava
Sicilian politics, the convulsions of a
prickly stubborn island you taught
us to call home. Lines
in a paper brought us together.
Time presses us into place.
David Tager lives in Columbia, MO. His poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction and translation have previously appeared in journals such as The Crescent Review, The Kenyon Review, Manoa, Well-Versed, and Tamaqua.
