She used to listen to Elvis Presley and she smoked.
She had a pack of large and strange cards
with which she’d predict the future
far-off as sequoias seen from below –
a difficult multiplication for me
counting my years on little more than one hand.
She drove me in her small yellow car
to the cinema, and said over and over she thought
that Liza Minelli was really beautiful,
and I told her that she was even more so.
I don’t think I was really in love with her –
not with that pure, childish, mimetic love –
but she gave me a hand in a grown-up game:
chatting with a woman you really like,
tasting what’s forbidden to you (dark-looking drinks),
being able to waste your time when it gets dark.
She went to live in town to work,
and one of those family misunderstandings
cut her off from me for ever,
like a flash of lightning striking a family tree.
We bumped into each other at some funeral,
and now we meet in the village, after all these years
(that have made her look like the one she wanted to),
and we don’t know what to say to each other, and we talk
of how things are going, of where we’re going,
and we share memories – like people who know each other.
I’ve not been able to remember what she predicted,
if this fate of ours was written,
but the one I was then has never forgotten
two clumsy drawings among the cards:
the big, bony, dead woman
and the tree of the hanged man.