New Poem: Love Song of the Virtual Expatriate, for DVerse and Beyond....

laundry drying on Calabrian coast...

Love Song of the Virtual Expatriate

You, stranger on the other side of our knowable

world, tell me a sirocco has spoken

to you of winter;

you have laundered your dresses to blinding white,

cabled them to dry at the lap

of the sea.

All that you do is repeated, the tides of love

going out, coming back, the village

cut  into the cliffs like the facets

of lapis lazuli.

The bright fish sulk in the deep;

your mariner trims his sail, moors

his craft; he shoulders his heavy-bodied catch;

climbs the stone steps, throws it down

touching you on the shoulder.

The pesce spada lies on your wooden table

with its round eyes brimming;

you gut the cold silver body;.

he banks the fire in the oven,

whittles down the roasting sticks.

This is the land where nothing is wasted,

even the sword-bone is sliced up for broth,

sweetened with wild basil hung in the window.

You work tears of lack into the bread.

Donna mia, when you ladle out the soup,

 push the plate before him, does he remark

at the taste of your grief?

ii

I come to your city; you take me

on a long walk into the antiquity

etched into the hills

the siroccos have polished to iridescence,

where the stone-paved streets are narrow

and the doors to the balconies stand open.

I pay for my two room villa

in bronze coins from a ruin.

There is a table in the window, an archway,

one room into the other

for the ceremony of homecoming, 
as I had asked.

The stonemason’s ghost welcomes me;

I put on my long grey dress,

tie my hair back; we string the peppers

together, these annunciations

we will hang

in the doorway.

iii

Night kisses the sea and the seas

lave the disconsolate beach.

Lovers, wake: I have come

to live among you with a valise,

no camera. Only what the pen

will bleed to damp paper.

For a lifetime I have dreamed of you

have I longed for the simplicity

of living these late star-flecked hours

in the ruin where my impasto poppies

gleam from old walls, the stucco ancient

with whispered birthing songs 
and widows’ thumbprints.

I drink a cup of your dialect,

I burn my hand in the flame

of your candle;

yet only now, when I am an old woman,

has a Charon in rebellion

brought me across.  

iv

Surely there is someone

charged with the work of transporting

us to our destinies.

For I tell you that somehow

I am a pariah in my own

town;

I live like a murderess imprisoned,

even though my door is unlocked.

How is it that we call ourselves neighbors?

Not one mothers the other, not one calls out

Are you all right?

v

It is only by imagining myself there

where you rejoice in the stranger come 
unto you, blown into your midst

in Pentedatillo, in Mosorrofa, 
as if I had entered the intimate and granular

photograph of a Calabrian wedding party,

that I look out as from a mirror

at myself writing alone

on this side of the world,

contained by my shadowy rooms,

moving my hands among the prolific geraniums,

dreaming myself among you
in the midnight kitchen,  

yeasting old sorrows to an assonant vernacular,

turning rich dough on the board. 

Copyright Jenne’ R. Andrews October 28, 2012