Letter from Gozo

Only last week, sick with a fever & retching, what I saw

were my mother’s hands hooked to my wrists. One grasped

the rim of the yellow sink, shaking; the other held my hair

away from my face. I do not know why I think you

of all the poets will understand this. How my toes

sometimes seem to be my father’s toes & the past,

a cobbled organ I have entered, thin as air & somehow become.

For us, always the matter, the meat as well as the meaning:

the giant tunny, that eight-hundred-pound mackerel

whose great gray body the seamen hunt in spawning season

the way they have for four thousand years. Because

the tunny will always flee in the direction of open water,

because it is so easy to drive it deeper & deeper

into a maze of nets. And when their camera della morte

is thick with the panicked, living flesh, a signal is given

& fresh-armed men are rowed from shore & the ropes

are raised & the mattanza begins. In one report, old men

from Messina gently cover the eyes of the gasping fish

before they strike them because the tunny struggles less

when blind. Tonight my computer will pluck from space

At the oldest temple in the world, no one pours an offering

or brings two palms together in prayer. Only a dog,

someone’s emaciated liver pointer, wanders in & out

of the five eroded apses, sniffing the stones. And though

he seems as sore-footed & awkward as memory,

he has been forgotten, as even I may soon forget him,

who give him a name & some bread & the local white cheese,

which is rubbed with pepper & made from the sea.

So near the first things, the open mouth of the last. Tell me,

is it like this with you? For my part, almost everything

behind I go on carrying, even the emptinesses,

which are sometimes large & heavy, but sometimes not.

At the harbor, as they do along the brown Delaware

& in the creeks of the lower Allegheny, where the stubborn

musky runs twelve months a year, fishermen cast their lines

from the edge. They wait on their low, painted stools

& sometimes still, seeing their rods bend & surely thinking

they have lured to the bait something quick & otherworldly,

they haul up the ancient slender-throated amphorae instead.