Tuscany, Last Summer

by A. Diao Lavina

How the afternoons lengthened.

I hid in the shade where the villa

grew from a crooked hill

and sipped the ripe local red

with Simeona the cook whose thorough years

jiggled every time she laughed into coughing.

The erudite undergrads below screamed

at worms, fat and slow, wakened tumbling

out of their worshipful darkness

inside the layers of an Etruscan temple.

The smell of earth that summer.

Color you can't quite recognize, whose names hung

air on the tip of an index finger, slipped flat

at the back of the tongue.

I forgot my hot city,

forgot the hamburgers and wilted fries on the train from Milan,

forgot the rumbling streets and naked stones of Rome.

The undergrads tell stories in the evenings. "This was how

we gathered at my home."

"That was how my mother made spaghetti

when we were little." One would look up

that summer from the square holes they were digging to sigh

and point at how the air is blue over Tuscany, how it teaches

that air has mass, look,

that blue near the mountains

is bluer than the blue beyond.

The rest would nod and turn back,

stooped over pottery bits

and cracked teeth in a grave.

Do they understand the dead men of Tuscany?

How they cut stone with their hands,

home every evening to the smell of tomatoes,

their wives' dusky fingers on leathern skin,

the cold water streaking dust down the backs of necks,

how their houses rose the ways the earth permitted,

the walls anchored like the stones of hills,

the roofs grazed, but barely, by strands of wind.

They have grown in places

where houses and apartment buildings were planted

by men in yellow hats pointing rolled papers to the hiss

and groans of rusting machines.

I don't blame them.

Their hands pale on the grain of Simeona's dinner table,

I lack the years to speak to them.

My hair has grown

but I have no patience.

The valley the third day. I slake ten months'

worth of knots in shoulders with a walk,

stumbled in the second hour upon the sunflowers,

hundreds of small faces hiding behind immature green.

And humbled, I lay face down

on the dust and fell to weighty dreams

descended and crushed a balm into my nostrils.

Earth, red. Specks of black dust.

Light roiled around my eyes.

I prayed, drowned in its tides.

Their lives peeled away, shyly

day by day the eyes stared a little longer.

From their thin necks my hands came away

scratched by small defenseless hair. The sun

called for weeks. They obeyed,

mute and beautiful soldiers.

They faded the last week

I was there, their proud bodies sank

to command immutable, again

they became approximations, no more.

It is true

that beauty singes our hearts

and leaves, trailing its names in our ears,

burning its faces into static masks

we unveil in lost minutes to caress

with blind fingers.

I summon most the innocent days

when I hid in the shadows of the villa.

How the afternoons lengthened,

how like a child I had not loved

nor touched death while it was alive,

its face

seducing thoughts of that one summer we are always young,

our sunburnt bodies tall under a purple sky,

ignoring the lifeless moon, small and distant.