“After my father’s death, I knock/ on my mother’s door,/ me
four feet tall, red leather purse in hand,/ fingers soft as bread/ and tell her
I am headed to a nunnery.”
“Nineteen, wandering in the Himalayas, at a monastery/ in
the clouds, I had just drunk the water/ from a stream hoping to get sick,
sitting/ at the feet of a monk/ whose skin I groped the night before”
from Adrie Kusserow, “Hunting Down the Monk”
The year my mother’s brain lost itself in the heat, I marked
the big stocky stone square in front of my school, erected to so-and-so and
now, Megan. The bulky thing was scribbled all over, a fount of words to learn
at eleven years old, and what was it, to add my name, just the first? And
somehow they caught me, somehow I walked into the assistant principal’s office
and burst into tears as the fat man serenaded me to “I Go to Pieces.”
Twenty-two, wandering in Umbria, at the aqueduct that arches over Spoleto,
linking cheap caffe corecto to the sacred mountain, I find myself in the city
of spray paint, in the country of graffiti. Italy, where every ruin carries
Latin in its soft mouth and the side streets wear “Hotboys” on brick slowly
turning to dust. Even the aqueduct is full of words, claims of location and forever,
and I have no desire to write on these monuments to ruined beauty. Climbing
Montelucco, sharp stone pierces rubber. In the sacred forest, I let the rain
strip my fingerprints from the bark. I brush my labored steps off the mountain as
I descend. I don’t want to mark this city, want to return to my own spoiled
cement unmarked, but Spoleto’s circled maze, its weed-ridden roofs, terra cotta
molding to spotted sinking sun and sky, erects its aged, incorruptible
elegance, its dome, its cranes, its lower city, all in my skull, bone
collecting location and forever.
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