How to Fly (In Ten Thousand Easy Lessons) Read online

  By involving fiber

  in my invocation

  of divinity,

  I feel assured

  of a fairly positive outcome.

  How to Love Your Neighbor

  All of them. Not just the morning shoppers,

  the man who walks his chortling dog, the couples

  with strawberry children. These are the given.

  Announce your rebel kindness in letters painted

  much too large on the back of your jacket. Children

  will stare, dogs bark. Doors bolt. Anyway, walk.

  Your shoes will wear out, and then your knees.

  You will feel the cold’s every angle, the want of rain,

  a drought of blessings. Your vanished face.

  Close by, behind dust-colored curtains, a woman

  wrapping her hijab—girding herself for the street

  of this day—will call to her husband: Come see.

  These two will kneel at their window.

  Mercy wears lightning bolts on her shoulder. Threads

  of fire in her white hair. The face of the sun.

  How to Be Hopeful

  Look, you might as well know,

  this device is going to take endless repair:

  rubber cement, rubber bands, tapioca,

  the square of the hypotenuse,

  nineteenth-century novels, sunrise—

  any of these could be useful. Also feathers.

  The ignition is tricky. Sometimes

  you have to stand on an incline

  where things look possible. Or a line

  you drew yourself. Or the grocery line,

  making faces at a toddler, secretly,

  over his mother’s shoulder.

  You may have to pop the clutch

  and run past the evidence. Past everyone

  who is praying for you. Passing

  all previous records is ok, or passing

  strange. Just not passing it up.

  Or park it and fly by the seat of your pants.

  With nothing in the bank, you will

  still want to take the express. Tiptoe

  past the dogs of the apocalypse

  asleep in the shade of your future.

  Pay at the window. You’ll be surprised:

  you can pass off hope like a bad check.

  You still have time, that’s the thing.

  To make it good.

  2

  Pellegrinaggio

  I. Pellegrinaggio

  At the end of the long bowling alley lane

  of a transatlantic flight, we crash and topple

  like pins in the back of a Roman taxi.

  Split or spare, hard to say what we are but

  family, piled across one another: husband

  and wife, our two daughters, his mother

  Giovanna who has waited eighty years

  to see what she’s made of.

  Her parents, flung out from here like messages

  in bottles, washed up on a new shore and grew

  together. Grew celery for the Americans. Grew this

  daughter who walked to school, sewed a new

  cut of skirt, and became the small interpreter

  for a family. They took her at her word but stamped

  a map called home on a life she believed would end

  before she could ever come here to find it.

  What other gift could we give her? But now our taxi

  crawls like a green bottlefly through the ear canals

  of a city, it is half-past something I can’t stand

  one more minute of, and I wonder what we were

  thinking. We all might die before we find a place

  to lie in this bed we’ve made for her. Beside me

  she sits upright, mast of our log-pile ship in this bottle.

  Made of everything that has brought us this far.

  II. The Roman Circus

  Navigating the tram:

  Do not mount the car without a ticket.

  Your ticket must be purchased

  within the car.

  Exchanging traveler’s checks:

  Go to the Spanish Steps! everyone agrees, for there

  (and nowhere else) officials will accept our deficient

  currency and throw baskets of money upon us.

  The Spanish Steps:

  Excuse the inconvenience as

  the American Express is closed.

  The Pantheon:

  Do not doubt that a yogurt-flavored gelato

  could be unparalleled in civilized human experience.

  Or the fig, as a close second.

  Trevi Fountain:

  Elbow yourself into the crowd

  of travelers throwing coins

  to guarantee another journey here, more elbows,

  more chances, one more coin.

  III. On the Piazza

  Through the scent of grilled fish

  a tarantella rises from the boy

  in tattered jeans but startling shoes—

  formal, black, perfectly polished—

  who plays his violin as if this

  teeming plaza were Carnegie Hall

  and his shoes, in that case, correct.

  We drink Chianti and keep an eye

  on the sweet-talking boys who cruise

  like sleek reef fish, slip bracelets

  onto our daughters’ pretty wrists:

  One euro, or your phone number.

  Jugglers stab at the darkness

  with flaming knives or the modern

  electric equivalent. But the one who’s

  got me is the tall masked pharaoh

  in a gold drape who stands

  immobile on a box, hour upon

  hour, his statuesque illusion

  a frozen, untouched island

  in the churning human torrent,

  except for his silent, folded bow

  when a coin is dropped at his feet.

  Later, relief arrives. The pharaoh

  wriggles free of his gilded cocoon—

  the metamorphosis—and his brother

  crawls in to take his shift. I imagine

  their small apartment shared with

  other immigrants from an African

  village of emptied-out fields,

  the intimacy of these two brothers

  living mostly just the one life now

  on Piazza Navona inside a golden sheet.

  IV. Into the Abruzzo

  Vomipeligna, the kids will later

  name this. Car pulled over

  onto the grassy verge of a much-too-

  winding road, the pale among us helping

  the ones beyond it. How quickly

  a roving family may find togetherness.

  We are trying to find our way back

  to the motherland. For air I wander into

  a field and find wild peonies blooming.

  Dancing, madly fragrant. Who knew

  the portly bouquets of Memorial Days

  hailed from such winsome hay-haired kin?

  Here to remind me of graveyards

  and surprising sites of origin.

  A mountain that holds us to its secrets.

  These feral granite ranges gave the world

  children, the mother of my mother-in-law,

  her son, our family, and peonies.

  V. In Torricella, Finding Her Mother’s House

  Here is the church. Mamma went

  every day, not just to pray but to sing.

  The boys dropped spiders on the girls

  from the balcony. One of the boys, she liked.

  Here is the house beside the church

  where the lawyer lived. He was rich.

  Mamma came every morning

  to help the lawyer’s wife dress

  and comb her long hair, to earn a coin.

  Six doors down, here is the house

  where she lived. Where her papa died.

  Wher
e they had nothing. Out of this door

  they went, she and her sister as children.

  They stood on this step to say goodbye.

  A stagecoach to Naples, from there a ship,

  to live with the cousin in Denver who

  had a tavern. Girls could work there.

  They didn’t know the cousin. Here is

  the graveyard where she saw her papa

  buried, the doorstep where she kissed

  the mamma she would never see again.

  Over the ocean to make her way,

  it started here.

  Look at this view.

  Why did she never tell me it was

  beautiful here? Never speak of so much,

  so much she left behind.

  VI. Circumnavigating Torricella Peligna

  Giovanna wants to know

  what there is to know about

  this mountain. Anything her mother

  might have seen if she walked

  downhill. Expecting not a lot, we

  drive through towns, each smaller

  than the one before. A church,

  a fountain. The town band on

  the square, all the young faces

  behind the bright blossoming bells

  of their instruments, the pollen

  drift of their music. The pozzo

  where cold water wells up

  from the stone heart of the land.

  A trattoria, a waiter who somehow

  sees everything, famiglia. Asks

  younger guests to move so she

  will have the best view. Tells our

  girls their nonna is an encyclopedia.

  They should read her every day.

  We watch clouds tease like a veil

  across the forested bluffs, but she is

  watching the mountain, her true north.

  VII. Pompeii

  It’s terrible, but we want to know

  all about the unfortunates caught flat

  when the mountain blew. We’ve read the

  firsthand account by Pliny the Younger,

  imagined the bay clogged with pumice,

  the screamers running around with

  pillows clasped to their heads. Now

  in the streets of their city we step high

  on great stone crosswalks designed

  for simultaneous passage of wagon wheels,

  pedestrians, and sewage. We admire

  the murals in their villas (in vogue then: red,

  and Egypt). Eager voyeurs, we drink it in

  like those doomed souls lined up

  at the taverns with their jugs. We visit

  the brothel and then the stadium with

  perfect acoustics that make us sing.

  Saved for last, the Garden of Fugitives,

  where mothers clung to their children

  behind the high wall, clawing for escape.

  Fossilized on their upturned faces we see

  the belief that anyone would recognize:

  in one more minute we will breathe again.

  As people do, we’ve come looking

  for proof that the dead of the past were just

  like us. And grow quiet, having found it.

  VIII. At the Top of Mount Vesuvius

  The view from here—

  down flower-bronzed slopes

  to the apron of cities from Naples

  to Sorrento—is one long allowance

  of habitation along the bay.

  How many lives have hugged this sea,

  how many eyes lifted to this crater

  wondering when she might throw

  her next fit of boiling lava?

  Puddled mounds like cow dung

  reveal themselves to be buried towns.

  A fringe of steam leaks from the crater’s

  smile. Her breath has notes of sulfur.

  But underneath this fine flat pledge of sky

  the sea is calm. The blood-red roofs.

  Even the newest houses, bone-colored,

  and the many more under construction.

  The view from here reaches backward

  into centuries; from down there forward only

  as far as half-past tomorrow.

  IX. Swimming in the Bay of Naples

  You float. I am not kidding.

  Your own shocking toes rise up

  to let you know. This is not

  like the cloying dark ponds of

  childhood, or the college pool

  where my lank leaden frame

  angled down and down beneath

  the bluster of the swimming

  instructor who insisted I would

  float if I just applied myself.

  How could I know? I had only

  to acquire an Italian family

  and follow it here to this sweetly

  salted sea like a fat featherbed

  where a body can lie in repose

  considering the successes

  of civilized people. Never mind

  what’s below, the real estate

  of old shipwrecks. I will stay

  up here. Now that I know the secret.

  X. On the Train to Sicily

  In a family compartment we take the long

  ride south, down the coast and across the channel

  to the patria of her father. She is so tired.

  We’ve lifted her onto the sill of this urbane clatter,

  tucked ourselves in a cupboard of relative

  peace, but now her small frame finds no resting

  place on the great square seats. We offer

  pillows, sips of water. She only says, Don’t worry.

  Panoramas pass in dramatic excess: castles,

  vineyards, splendidly pointed mountains cloaked

  in olive trees. We feel abashed for these

  wonders, but worry that we’ve dragged her bones

  through too many stations of this cross.

  The unstoppable rhythm of filial love pulls us on

  and on along its track. South of Cetraro

  our cupboard is invaded: a girl. Deep blue hair

  drawn low across her brow like a wartime

  blackout curtain. Inked with skulls and crossbones

  to her knuckles, dark eyes resting loose

  on the air overhead. She ignores us.

  We rock in a silent tedium of mutual discomfort,

  willing this suddenly scrambled nest into something

  whole again, when the ring of her mobile

  snaps her into focus, window flung wide: Ciao, Mamma!

  XI. Monreale

  My grandmother came here just once.

  People rarely traveled in those days,

  she tells us, as we navigate the twisting

  approach, steering wheel arm over elbow,

  not far outside Palermo but what a road.

  She spoke of it for the rest of her life.

  She had never seen anything like it.

  Afterward we grow talkative with

  our marvel at the cathedral, its golden

  mosaics and honeycombed ceiling,

  chatter about the different kinds of

  beauty, our good luck at seeing

  a wedding party arrive, that dress

  of hers. The white Rolls-Royce

  parked in front! Our marvel wanders.

  Giovanna in the back seat closes her eyes:

  I’m going to be quiet now

  and think about my grandmother.

  XII. Lemon-Orchard Blue

  The language has its words

  for blue—azzurro, blu, ciano—

  and it could use some more.

  Tranquil sea, tormented sea,

  shallow and deep, stormy but stippled

  with light, a blue where anything

  could be hiding behind an alibi

  of sepia ink. And this does not begin

  to address the sky: glazed

  like a Moorish
tile, or furtive

  as a memory of Vesuvius.

  Innocent as a twenty-cent postcard.

  These are the sturdy blues

  that stand in line for an eye to call out.

  Others wait behind them: the blue,

  for instance, that was always here

  stretched tight as a laundered sheet

  above the orchard where a point-eared dog

  stalks his lizard and the lemon trees

  bend their arms, whitewashed to the elbow,

  pushing flat bouquets of leaves

  against heaven, the wheeling swallows,

  and one season’s ration of cloud.

  XIII. The Road to Erice Is Paved with Intentions

  My mother-in-law, as she puts it, has intentions.

  Advice from a priest to carry a heart

  past unbearable losses, a husband and daughter,

  and strike its path through one more day:

  Get up and make intentions.

  I intend to call a friend on the phone.

  I intend to notice the flowers in the yard.

  It cannot be easy to be this old, with a heart

  tugged by loss and a family’s interventions

  across the stones of Sicily. But on we go, I declare

  the plan for our day: we will drive to Erice.

  Picture us up there gazing down at the water,

  across the blue southern seas. If the day

  is fine, I intend for us to see all the way to Rome.

  Erice has other intentions, remains a hard

  medieval gleam on the mountaintop—shaved

  white scoop of vanilla ice on a tall volcanic cone.

  It melts as we lurch and falter up the winding trace

  where so many men try to stop us. First, a scare

  with a flagman, next the funicular man, and then

  the carabinieri. But I am intent: we slip by.

  At a roadblock, we are forced to park the car.

  Boldly I link my arm through hers and declare

  to all men gathered there, “I’ve brought her

  this far. We are going to walk to Erice.” They wave

  and waggle their heads as if we are Verdi’s demented

  foreign witches. But she and I with heads held high

  march past their barricade. And that is when

  they start screaming, “Una gara!” With the rising roar

  it dawns: gara, garage, holy mother, an auto race.

  Flung to the ditch, our hearts surpassing all known