Ash (after Sweet Fire)

All that is left of our afternoon
is the ash from your cigarette,
seeds from the sesame kurabiye biscuits,
and some tea leaves—alas—I cannot read.

Would that we had kissed, sinned, burned,
that we were reduced to ashes,
and that these ashes were all that remained of the blaze.

Are we too old, too sensible, or too afraid,
of the dolce foco, in which I’d gladly burn
touching the sun and never look back
like Phaeton—

or die more slowly with excruciating pleasure
ascend in the entwined smoke
of two cigarettes?

But le vent l’emportera,
the wind bears it all away,
fire, smoke, ash, and the sweet smell
of Contradiction.®

Legacy (for Catherine Carlo Pallitto)

Their work is prayer, says Sister Mary
of the monks’ coffin-making labor.

Regal cheekbones
nose proud as a bird’s
hair, tufts of feather
the faraway look of one
perched before flight
the hospice bed but a temporary nest
for this bird-like creature.

Family history: tales of
my Italian grandmother, mythic to me
once breathed into life in words
from my aunt's parched lips.
inaccessible, now.

“Water?” I ask;
“Why bother?”
is the fierce retort,
from this fierce kind creature,
this three-time survivor
of a new heart
nestled into her chest the way
she might have held a child,
the way the tumor nestles inside her.
That is all that grows now.

Yet the instinct to nurture is there still.
Though she can no longer eat, she asks me:
“Honey, do you make your own gravy?”
And I: “I do, sometimes.”
Wishing I could feed her
as she has fed me,
she who cannot eat
But I only ask for her recipe.

I imagine a rich sauce simmering all day,
such secrets aunt Catherine, then a young wife,
wrestled from Betty, née Donata, over
white mountains of laundry from nine men,
from the family outcasts she'd housed.
“Somebody had to do it,”
she’d explained.

And then:
she crooks a claw-like finger
and I bend closer
to hear the secret of life,
my bequest from Aunt Catherine,
She should know:
happily married for 63 years,
“keeping company” for 68.

“Did you ever hear of Franceso Rinaldi?”
“Yes,” I say.
“Well, I add a little garlic, chopped up.
We like it.”
She nods in that conspiratorial way
specific to Italians of that generation.

Just so, my aunt, the wife of my godfather Uncle Tony,
whispered to me the secret of happiness.
before she died, soon after.

It is the secret I share with you.
It’s that simple.