NOTE: This is a radical rewrite of a very old poem not found online. It’s different enough in meaning and execution that I’m calling it a new poem.
Sing a song of Salvatore,
who married
my grandmother Luisa
after my grandfather died.
After my grandfather died
she had to sell the candy store.
My mother turned six the day he died.
My mother turned six the day he died.
My grandmother tried to hold it together
for her, but it fell apart. She went for relief
to the Red Cross and they told her,
don’t let it fall apart. Dress up pretty,
hit the street, keep it together. Lots of women
do it. Desperate times, etc. She
didn’t. Married Salvatore instead,
her dead husband’s best friend, seemed like
he needed a maid or something with three
old boys of his own. My mother was lost
in that; she found a way out. Went
overseas, met my father, married, had me,
moved back to take care of Salvatore
and Luisa. I remember a rough man with just
nine rough fingers, lost one young with a single stroke
of a mason’s hammer. Smoked rough cigars,
spoke rough Italian I couldn’t decipher
through his whiskey-soaked emphysema. When he died,
I didn’t much care. When my grandmother died
I stopped caring altogether.
Sing a song of Salvatore,
the scary nine-fingered drunk
I never understood or much cared for.
I wonder what might have happened
to his amputation, if the only place it lives on
is in those dreams where I find it
wriggling under my pillow, which happen often, which is
no surprise as what’s missing
from my history so often
shows up there.
Luisa wasn’t buried next to Salvatore.
She has her plot
next to Antonio,
my sixty-years dead blood grandfather,
instead. I don’t visit their graves
except like this, out loud, from a distance,
whenever I wonder
what it must be like
to miss someone for that long,
what her dreams
were like, what might have come to life
under her pillow, night after night.
Dark Matter 