Poetry Magazine, Peter Tomassi, April 2002

Poetry Magazine

Peter Tomassi

USA

A BETTER THING

The man is translated,
his hands

hold the cup and saucer of perfection,
an approximation the Italians still think replicas

cut from the ends of bronze sinews.
Was it Tuscany where they first found him?

He had traveled a long way
for a statue,

passing the fish markets and street vendors,
down Wall Street where he stopped to praise a bear,
taunt a bull;

he still holds the cup from which he will never sip
nor collect water nor meat nor bone,

but I toast you anyway, my friend, and I eat for you,
for you who have outlived me

will never tire of travel.

Published in The Chiron Review, Fall 2001

Outside a Shop Near OLD HAVANA

Lining the window:
shampoo, detergents,
one plastic daisy–
small fingers on wisps of cloud.

The revolution shrugs and billows–
when they cracked the bellies of slot machines in ‘59
out came the dollars,
a snap of fresh grass,

and there is still grass in Havana,
but only the promise of lawns
hovering here and there,
a faint smell of gasoline and cash and

apparitions that float like burning tobacco.
They say that Che’s body worked all night
while his spirit rested among palm leaves and smoke,
the separate soul of the revolutionary man,

just an idea
you can still see floating here
in plumes of muscle and exhaust,
and they have forgotten none of it,

when, swinging his hips in a cafeteria somewhere
each night, a boy hands his lover a single flower
as they walk home dreaming
only of grass, of smoke.

unpublished

MAN RESOLING SNEAKERS

Threading the bottom of the thin inward faces,
the eyes and ears of a cigar roller’s son
who has fallen badly
and wears on one shoe
the weight of all his body,

and he would have played baseball
in Miami or New York
while his father retired
to blow smoke rings over the breakers
and walk to see and smell on bare
light feet.

South Carolina review Spring 2002

For B.B. King

Before you can master it you must learn
each note on the fretboard imagine they tell you
the bearing of a hundred scales
the shapes your fingers make
spanning the nut and bridge
in perpetual geometry as if you could swing
from ship to ship on a chord swinging
from horizon to horizon playing
dumb to a hundred currents to the sound of waves
shrinking to the attack of whistle and squeak

But you stop. And take one shape, a single
course through the neck: not a gliding at all,
a hand extending its shake
to a sole fish that might rise
to meet you out of the brine,
flop onto your fingers as they pick,
into the pick to become its picking,
from horizon onto lone string, playing
one fret, a bent note, the only note that
follows you, as if wading the Mississippi

you find the end of your song.

Publishing in The Chiron Review Fall 2001

REMEMBERING THE DEAD

The rains that came back to us after a day of sun
will continue says our host Eduardo
for three days this time
and the house will smell of mice
and we will drink rum in the kitchen with the cats
while the rain does its work in the fog.
I summon my grandmother draining pasta at the window.
She looks up out of the steam.
Is she crying?
She is happy. The family would have just arrived
to sip coke in the sun parlor as my grandfather came
from the basement with a soda bottle of wine,
and they would watch through all of the windows
the squirrels running in scorched grass
or look out to the pool being dug,
where water brought up dead yellow jackets,
and it would look like one of the great pools of Italy
when it was finished: dark and still,
so you wouldn’t need a photograph to remember
what our family looked like, but only a pool of water
which might not come for years or only in dreams;
the pool filled with cinder block and stone,
stone that would take in and pass these images
as if its memory could drop into another pool,
outside of a kitchen sharing the same timbre of earth,
the sound of stones passing below the rain,
where you might see their thoughts rising with the dead
the rain brought back to us after a day of sun,
which will continue, says Eduardo, as long as the house
smells of mouse nests and we drink rum in the kitchen,
watching water etch fog in the window
helping us to remember.

Published in The Chiron Review, Fall 2001