“Though we vacationed in a castle, though I/ rode you hard
one morning to the hum/ of bees that buggered lavender, and later/ we shared
gelato by a spotlit dome/ where pigeons looped like coins from a parade--/ we
weren’t transported back to newlyweds.”
Beth Ann Fennelly, “Souvenir”
My mother, before the dresses of soft ash, halved pink and
bitter, ate it glazed with sugar, but I respect the grapefruit, the only of its
surname that can spoil the tongue for hours, trap the mouth like my mother’s
Japanese jewelry box, shut now in Georgia, holding the dark against splinters
of jade, a coral earring, busted pearls, and two age-rubbed Dire Straits
tickets. Though I returned twice for the sunburnt taste of the puritan
grapefruit sorbetto, though I let the Pantheon lower behind me, a massive stone
and marble sunset, and thumbed the nozinno to take Rome’s only clarity into
myself, and knew the words to “Tunnel of Love” a busker thrummed before a
policeman, long burn between his lips, I did not miss my mother out of death,
into the piazza. It was not for her eyes that I turned my back and threw two
centesimi to the Trevi, it was for my fiancé, to pull him here with my return.
I poured my mother over the blue of sky and the rails of the Walnut Street
Bridge, letting her drift to the Tennessee, dark rain. She was not there in the
ash still clinging to my sandals from a Saturday in Pompeii.
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