Issue 2:2 | Poetry | Chris Camuto
3 Poems |
 |
Arberesch
for Delores Scutari (1905?-2002)
The hills of Basilicata have been waiting,
patient as time, biding your restlessness
all these years, home and not home
to a head-strong girl who wouldn’t stay.
The Sarmento chatters like a gossip,
gathers weather in its rocky bed
biding your absence these long years
still conceding nothing to your dreams.
In Brooklyn, the last great old-world village,
a priest intones the high mass you wanted,
gathered generations of your loved ones
more lost in stony stares than tears.
After they have buried you, go home
to the rocky fields, the larks and falcons,
the fig trees and beech groves, lean sheep
and leaner wolves, dusty roads and stone alleys,
the creaking carts and creaking wells that embarrassed
your young heart’s high hopes so many years ago.
Your soul belongs where you were born.
You will be less lonely there, less sad.
The cuirassed pine waits on the mountain;
the white houses are sturdy and clean-swept.
In May, red scarves flutter in the dance.
finding
good cover late in the day late in the season
The climb took all we had
a long steep trek through open timber
impoverished understory sunlit and empty
the dog disdaining every stitching of rabbit track
resisting the musty scent of deer
but doubting the unpromising way
until we crested one last ridge and
blinded by that cold white winter sun
found this long hollow thick with cover.
We should have been here years ago
years ago some October
hickory and maples flaming
the flames drawing warm currents of air
through the fragrant rot and fruition of
these now scentless snowbound woods.
Imagine russet birds flushing slowly
gathered out of grapevine and greenbrier
bursting clear of the dog’s point
held timelessly for a moment between earth and air
until that otherworldly rumble of wings—
thuckathuckathucka
thucka thucka thucka thucka—
left us to pursue the echo of an echo
and a wildly blurred image along this newfound ridge.
That would have been a fall and years of autumns aflame
strung from season to season like a river of endless woods
from which russet grouse burst blurred and echoing—
thucka
thucka thucka thucka thucka—
with all the time in the world to follow.
woodcock
in the cabin hollow
That was early March that time--
cold gray sky and a warm breeze
two seasons gusting together
trees and pasture grasses
bending to the way of things.
We circled like the contending seasons
walking the cabin hollow for distraction
in an afternoon when everything and nothing
might be a focal point in the unrevealing
light of an indifferent day.
What turns the eye when the mind is blank?
What stirs the heart between seasons?
As if there were something between the seasons—
some uncharted hour into which
we walked that odd, contrary afternoon,
some eddy in the way of things,
an uncanny moment out of time
within which we could somehow
breathe and walk about,
feet coming firmly to damp earth while,
empty of any useful emotion,
we listened to the jays and
watched the whitethroats in the bare haw,
pushing our way through
thickets of last year’s goldenrod.
We clambered along the muddy creek
climbing over windfalls that hid fresh
burrows until our exertions brought
us back into the world,
whichever world that was,
and left us disappointed by the root-rotted
sugar maple, ruined now,
at least in the guise we preferred,
the thriving tree that blazed in fall.
Hard to say now, after all this time,
from which side of things the woodcock flushed,
its purpose interrupted, its rattling, whistling flight
weaving out of time and in time,
stitching back and forth across the same
odd boundary along which we had stumbled.
The bird glowed golden brown
even in the unflattering light,
its stark form unmistakable.
That was the warmest
and the coldest thing we saw that day,
a bird and the image of a bird
catching our unresolved eyes—
was there more than one
or did the same bird circle back—
suggesting something about the way
things seemed compared to other ways
we remember them having seemed
to be in early March.
That gusty
wind blew through our words
scattering what we tried to say.
What’s left when the words have been blown away?
The indifferent light of an indifferent day,
crow caw overhead and restless
geese down at the river,
those wintry coils of clouds,
that warm, nagging wind
the woodcock gone suddenly
and the silence between us.
