Poetry from The Literary Review
Fire
Joanne Tangorra
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Restless child, the sun wanders off, unloosed from the gaze of adoration. No tracks. Pine needles underfoot and clouds gray-yellow, old summer whites hung out one more season. Puffed up will of the disembodied, the past comes back dragging memory along with it, the reluctant witness who must expose you, whose mercy makes you want to admit your complicity in petty crimes against the self— the cover-ups and falsehoods, the tongue held too long lapsing into rant, reverie, the perpetual present-tense of the never forgotten, of no forgiveness: cut grass summer Saturday, the girl first to hear the whine of sirens as if they’re meant for her, though she doesn’t yet know, laughing & running with the others down one block then another. The way home. Her own house burning, her father rolling in the grass mad-eyed as a martyr, and there is nothing I can do to warn her.
Light itinerant across the grid of cobblestones. All afternoon they shift their chairs into it, the nature of anonymity that wanting to be found out, the risk of exposure that draws these two together, foreigners who sit at the corner caffè like conspirators, their instructions to forget any memory of one another or this one afternoon in Rome, an ellipsis of starlings across a painterly sky, between them the meaningful gaps of what goes unsaid or isn’t worth saying. Even clouds trail off mid-sentence. She writes letters home He sketches the campanile (hands stilled at three) the perpetual procession of saints in mosaic on the church façade, five on either side of the Virgin, eyes fixed on the child who looks beyond her. How to see past shaky skids of scaffolding, to put in perspective this faith imagined on a single plane? Every quarter hour the bells’ measured lament: Time passes. History goes on revising its one implausible story. The world is a mortal body: stone made hollow by dripping water, great monuments in ruin, how the gold band close to the finger thins, impossible to know when the loss occurs so slow is the erosion. |
