Four Poems | Donna Pucciani
Alessandro, Five Months Old
In twenty years, your old American auntie
will be dead—or wishing she were—
and you will be a young man strutting your stuff
in the streets of Madrid, turning heads in tavernas
or at the university where your English
spangles the campus of Romance tongues.
Your pants will be tight, or fashionably baggy ―
who knows the future a la mode—
and you will be clean-shaven, or bearded,
or somewhere in between, but now,
Alessandro, your eyes own the blue
of the ocean. Your hair, a blondish fuzz,
remains a mystery on the little head
you are learning to hold up with the macho
strength of a bull’s neck. In Chicago, you have
graced me with a visit. At dawn, the warm lump
of your body is hard to lift in my bony arms,
your baby flesh growing at imperceptible speed,
your face a wordless map of the world,
an undiscovered universe.
We dance cheek to cheek in the dark,
our love forever swaddled in the dawn’s
inaudible hymn. The years will vanish
behind us in the blink of your eye.
Now the Milky Way feeds you, your strawberry
mouth sucking intergalactic sustenance.
Don’t cry. Your day is dawning as your elders
balance on the edge of twilight.
The earth waits to receive them, even as
it flung you into existence just months ago
with a cosmic shudder. I ask only
that you remember the wrinkled hands
that cradled you on this October morning
as your muscled legs learned to kick
for the first time against my aching joints,
where your small swathe of forehead
has borrowed the creases of mine,
folding the two of us together
in the gathering light.
Double Vision
From Earth
airplane and star are visible
together
one a floating box
of humans breathing,
eating, snoring
the other a fireball
possibly a planet
with a mythical name
two little icons
glowing white
Sometimes
the difference is obvious:
one bobs in the dark
a mechanical yo-yo
the other a cosmic dot
on the vestments of night
Some evenings
a fog blurs
sight and mind
Indistinguishable
is the flesh-filled silver
falcon cleaving the sky
heading for the airport
from the stellar gleam
ablaze overhead
Discovery
Baby Alessandro is not Columbus,
(who, in fact, did not discover America),
or Magellan, though some days he seems
to sail his own private seas, trying to grab
the horizon. He is not Galileo, nor Curie.
He does not yet know, at four months old,
on what bright star he makes his home.
He lies on his back in the crib, watching
light play like strange birds on the ceiling.
His little face is soft, unlined. The blue orbs
of his eyes are philosophical, wondering why
the pacifier falls to the floor, as the apple
might fall from the tree. He is a tiny sage,
a virtual Socrates, as he stares into space,
a stranger to himself, engaged in syllables
of silent dialogue.
He seeks answers
but cannot formulate the questions.
His limbs flail restlessly in the morning sun.
Then something red crosses his field of vision,
though, according to the experts, he can see
only black and white.
He waves at the bobbing object, then grabs
the brightness of his sock, feels something beneath.
It is warm. It is alive. It moves. Amazement shines
in the wonderment of a body part, clutched
briefly in his fist. He has discovered his foot.
Life will never be the same.
He will soon learn to sit up, crawl, then walk,
to name things that used to hide in the corners
of ancient rooms, in the recesses of his brain.
Now he can only grasp his toe, asking
without language the meaning of life, of self,
of touch, that most important of all senses.
Lost Art
Writing letters was, in those days,
the only transatlantic option,
the internet not yet invented,
the telephone not yet mobile,
flights too costly.
Air mail was our salvation,
the tissued fold-over letters,
thin and blue as the skies they
would travel, their own envelope
dressing them inside and out.
And later, separate leaves piled up
when words overflowed the pre-paid
double-creased singletons, and a sheaf
of ideas flew carefree as birds in a weightless
blue envelope, purchased at the stationer’s,
that miraculous anachronism.
We wrote of films and philosophers,
books and family suicides, weather events
and autocratic leaders, powerful and ridiculous.
Through the hours, we penned, then typed
our intimate language on an old Smith Corona,
metallic blue.
Finally, imagination took up residence
in our laptop computers, keyboards ready
to eavesdrop on syllables and years. Goodbye
to typewriters clacking unevenly in the twilight.
Farewell to airplanes, their bags stuffed
with the freight of our sound and speech.
Anticipation of the other’s heartbeat
across an ocean witnesses felicity and regret,
friendship and desire inked digitally on a page.
The waiting never stops.
Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash
Bio
Donna Pucciani, a Chicago-based writer, has published poetry worldwide in Shi Chao Poetry, Poetry Salzburg, Meniscus, ParisLitUp, Agenda, Gradiva, and other journals. Her seventh and most recent collection of poetry is EDGES.
