The shadow
ran before it lengthening
and a wave went over.
Distance
did not obscure
the machine of nature:
you could watch it
squander and recompose itself
all day, the shadow-run
the sway of the necessity down there
at the cliff-base
crushing white from blue.
Come in
by the arch
under the campanile parrocchiale
and the exasperation of the water
followed you,
its Soldi, soldi
unpicking the hill-top peace
insistently.
He knew, at twenty
all the deprivations such a place
stored for the man
who had no more to offer
than a sheaf of verse
in the style of Quasimodo.
Came the moment,
he would tell it
in a poem
without rancour, a lucid
testament above his name
Paolo
Bertolani
– Ciao, Paolo!
– Ciao
Giorgino!
He would put them
Giorgino going
over the hill
to look for labour;
the grinder
of knives and scissors
waiting to come up, until
someone would hoist his wheel
on to a back, already
hooped to take it,
so you thought
the weight must crack
the curvature. And then:
Beppino and Beppino
friends
who had in common
nothing except their names and friendship;
and the sister of the one
who played the accordion
and under all
the Soldi, soldi,
sacra conversazione
del mare –
della madre.
Sometimes
the men had an air of stupefaction:
La Madre:
it was the women there
won in a truceless enmity.
At home
a sepia-green
Madonna di Foligno
shared the wall
with the October calendar –
Lenin looked out of it,
Mao
blessing the tractors
and you told
the visitors:
We are not communists
although we call ourselves communists
we are what you English
would call… socialists.
He believed
that God was a hypothesis,
that the party would bring in
a synthesis, that he
would edit the local paper for them,
or perhaps
go northward to Milan;
or would he grow
as the others had – son
to the puttana-madonna
in the curse,
chafed by the maternal knot and by
the dream of faithlessness,
uncalloused hands,
lace, white
at the windows of the sailors’ brothels
in the port five miles away?
Soldi –
soldi –
some
worked at the naval yards
and some, like him
were left between
the time the olives turned
from green to black
and the harvest of the grapes,
idle
except for hacking wood.
Those
with an acre of good land
had vines, had wine
and self-respect. Some
carried down crickets
to the garden of the mad Englishwoman
who could
not
tolerate
soldi, soldi
for recapturing them…
The construction
continued as heretofore
on the villa of the Milanese dentist
as the evening
came in with news:
– We have won
the election.
– At the café
the red flag is up.
He turned back
quickly beneath the tower.
Giorgino
who wanted to be a waiter
wanted to be commissar
piling sassi
into the dentist’s wall.
Even the harlot’s mother
who had not dared
come forth because her daughter
had erred in giving birth,
appeared by the Trattoria della Pace.
She did not enter
the masculine precinct,
listening there, her shadow
lengthened-out behind her
black as the uniform of age
she wore
on back and head.
This was the Day
which began all reckonings
she heard them say
with a woman’s ears;
she liked
the music from the wireless.
The padre
pulled
at his unheeded angelus
the town in the bay below
where – come the season –
they would be preparing
with striped umbrellas,
for the stranieri and milanesi –
treason so readily compounded
by the promiscuous stir
on the iridescent sliding water.
He had sought
the clear air of the cliff.
– Salve, Giorgino
– Salve
Paolo, have you
heard
that we have won the election?
– I am writing
a poem about it:
it will begin
here, with the cliff and with the sea
following its morning shadow in.