Original Prompt 1, Week 1

“My childhood was filled with untranslatable points of view/….Traveling into each new lexicon/ is to inhabit a new country, map its pathways into the mind”

Diane Thiel, “Lost in Translation”

Here, they do not say, “I like it,” but “mi piacce,” which is “it pleases me.” You do not own your pleasure, pressing it to the black well of a café correcto, the strangozzi tangling a fork, or a child on your way to Italian class, dark hair knotted in the light Spolettini rain, palming the smile marked across a yellow balloon. Rather, pleasure is the yellow balloon, its happiness in permanent marker, drifting into open hands, it pleases. Everything here is marked in this way, a graffitied Guy Fawkes grinning on stucco, “Sveglia.” Wake up, un-sleep yourself, unclose your purpled eyelids. This land of so many markings, where even the absence of the white marble in the Forum is a kind of written language, spelled out in red poppies and overgrown weeds. The fortress wall of Spoleto is Roman, Etruscan, and Italian, stone by stone by stone, and the weeds strangled through over centuries are only the permanent mark of the ephemeral. Mold spots the terracotta, like Dante’s ink on the bristled fur of his second beast. What I am trying to say is that all this inscription reminds me that I have my mother’s haunted eyes, only so much less like the huge circular glass pieces with their slate sockets in the Catedrale di Santa Maria Ascunto. Non, no. Mine are narrowed under the heavy boulder of my father’s brow. The scar on my lip, the mark of a trampoline spring and my sister’s neglect turned to an insistence on teaching me “to handle my business.” And the narrow gold thread, the same gold flecking from Fra Lippo Lippi’s fresco of the life of his Mary, crowned not by God, but by diamonds, how does it mark? I love it, I said across the table from his parents, still awed that my small fingers are the same width as his late grandmother’s, Olive Frances. Every night, before I stored it in its new red velvet seat—the original now maroon and kept beside the evaluating papers—I asked him if he liked it and he pressed his lips to the cut in answer. Does it please you?