Elaine Terranova

The spring my father died,
when I came to believe that everyone 
was mortal, I found a spot at the back of my leg,
jagged and dark, that held on like a tick.
I waited for it to grow into a cancer.
First blemish, I thought, in a spoiling fruit.
So small, and yet a mark, a certainty.

I�d been in Egypt, studying the past.
One day, a colossus lay before me in sand
as if it had just fallen across my path.
A cart driver was taking me along the desert
to a buttery or a pottery, he might even
have been saying, leprosary. He couldn�t
be stopped. We came at last to a Coptic church 
where he showed me signs drawn 
in old copy books, a blue-tiled emptiness.

I became aware of the spot as I climbed 
up to my place in a vast arena.
I was looking down behind me at small, 
scattering figures. The performance,
a circus or spectacle, just about to begin.

While I was young, while death
was still the exception, 
turning up unexpected, shining,
like a coin at the bottom of my purse, 
I lived for the first time 
away from home, two floors up 
from a furrier and just above
a Greek family 
where a sister killed her brother.

Some Saturdays a deaf man 
went from door to door selling needles. 

And I�d thought, "Yes. 
What a quiet activity it is, 
to sew." I too lived 
without the bewitchment of speech.
Even the sound of rain stunned me. 
So I trembled to hear 
the wretched mother keening.

Slowly, I filled up my small room--
the years at home had starved me 
of myself. To say I was happy 
is not exact. More,
like someone who agrees
to her own sacrifice or exile,
that it was necessary.

Night after night
the woman�s wails rose up 
through the floorboards. 
I imagined her in black, rent clothes 
with her double sorrow, 
grief rising and falling back.
I imagined 
that terrible rocking.

Each day as I passed beneath
the dark arch of the stairwell,
I waited for her 
to wave away scarves and darkness 
and emerge, clear-eyed, somehow reconciled.

You know how night shuts down everything,
and it is only the moon that stands there,
beckoning?

Well, I am thinking of 
Rembrandt�s dark interiors, how he pulls 
the person out of the shadows. "Woman with Pink,"
for instance. She is holding a flower before her 
as if to light her way into the world.

Or of vampires, who can only live, if that
is what they do, at night--collectors
of loss, my friend, an expert, calls them,
dirt from the homeland, one or two 


bartered Botticellis. Theirs is strictly
a literary existence, no roots, she�d say,
in the collective unconscious. That is why
they are beloved, creatures of longing,
as we are, for what has never been.

I did not go to the high school reunion.
Twenty known deaths so far. 
Even our crewcut class president 


who led cheers in white bucks, 
raving away the dark. I hope my friend Ted
is still alive and no walking skeleton with AIDS.

Sometimes now, there�s the same impatient rain
I remember from that time, with a brilliant sun 
to follow, radiance behind everything, 
like a view glimpsed in a rearview mirror.

Tonight, eating these half-withered, negative
little plums, the end of their season, 
I am listening to Bach�s Partita for solo violin. Imagine
the instrument, pouring out its heart alone like that.