Marzamemi

My Palermo

I will never live in Palermo,

But in Kalsa near the strangler tree

The old men stop traffic and lay out 

Vintage cars like proud parents, 

Dying for love. Pressed and shaved, they 

Murmur, smile, and sweat in the sun

It’s always Indian summer in 

This sweet sea-scented courtyard, where

My mother might live, whispering to roses,

Shouting at the doorman, wrangling dogs 

With calls heard across Messina, 

Happy as she’s never been

Under the branches, around the 

Long-limbed embrace, immune to Sicily’s slow

Seduction—the hypnotic sea, the living apart—

She walks concentric circles, outsmarts the

Carabinieri, and referees the soccer kids,

Who really have gotten out of hand 

“No man is an island,” she insisted once, 

Having never read John Donne—

She’s older now, resting on the bench,

Steps ahead, out of reach, as she’s always been, 

While I admire the strangler’s swollen roots, 

And Palermo is a stranger you haven’t met yet

How beautiful nature is, she

Says, in truth, a type of prayer:

Se son rose, fioriranno. My Palermo, 

My Palermo, my Palermo.

The Moors had one thousand years—

And still, I will never know Palermo, 

As her fair-haired and bronze-skinned cousins,

Whose glass eyes I search as one cups an ear

To a statue, misremembers a dream, or slips

A probing tongue along the spine of a book

What do they know of California, where my mother lives,

Dreaming of cowboys, as she’s always dreamed?

They count hours and blessings and wonder about

America, where their in-laws live, lived once, or hope to live—

Night falls, hotter than day, on stone balconies and

This week’s linen. All you can do is sweat and lie still

Across Ballarò the souk merchants cry 

O My God, O My God, O My God in the dark—

A boast, for their wares are so fresh they

Have just arrived or may arrive tomorrow,

Tomorrow, when we won’t stay for long,

But in Palermo, my Palermo, I feel free

Marzamemi

I dream away the time from the Greek harbor 

Though I’ve never been to Marzamemi, a name

Which means “the hand” or “Phoenician violets” 

In a language hardly anybody knows

It’s ordinary, or so I hear, and make plans to visit, 

Except it’s really neither Phoenician nor Sicilian,

Which sound like hymns from the underworld or

Guarded hearts floating over whitewash to the sea 

The northern wind says it’s late, consult the 

Sundial in the olive grove, settle the price of 

Citrus, which must never eclipse 4,000 lira or

10 drachma or 2 euro or some tender of dinar, 

A Latin word for the currency of Islam 

Find a place where trains run on the hour and the

Women are less cruel, their desires lost to memory

I drove through with a lost love for dinner once, 

It was so good, she said, though it wasn’t—

Our host, the only one still awake, with blazing eyes 

Said no not hands nor flowers everybody knows

Marsà al hamen means “Bay of Turtle Doves”