La Frateria di Padre Eligio, 1998

Her father was poisoned by something he ate in Assisi. Despite
the maritime pines, the cyprus–trees, a hand–painted
menu, he had difficulty arriving for the meal. But she, who
was already someone else (she had always
thought so), slipped the boar's liver —
purple and lovely — into her mouth. Carmen,
devoted before her large oven, invited her to stay.
She wouldn't, not then.

She met me years later, at a bar
with deliberate lighting and patrons
arranged as if for a photograph. She said,
“You're a poet? Well, I was once a thief.”

Women like Carmen considered their lilacs
safe. An easy bargain, they believed. At night,
however, she climbed fences, avoided streetlamps,
and pushed the vulnerable blossoms into a bag.
With La Cenerentola soaring through her rooms,
she painted each flower with egg white, dipped
it in sugar, and placed it on a rack to dry.

Fingering the photographs, she said,
without looking up, “I have never left.”
Snow is on the ground outside; the icy stairs
descending to the street are lethal.
“I am still pressing my tongue against
pancetta. The pheasant never grew moist.
Do you understand me?”

But what when the effect preempts the cause?
Even a posteriori dismantled in her head. A dry bird
roasting itself back into life, lifting out of the pan
on mottled wings and splitting the open space of a window,
the meat on its bones redeemed and muculent.

What when she rises in the night and sings herself
back into a photograph of a woman standing
in a hidden courtyard. What when her passport
was never stamped for exit, when a motorcycle
pulls her through an Italian afternoon and
she has two years to decide what next.