~ Delta Poetry Review ~

Maria Surricchio

Evenings He Sat Smoking

silently for hours
on our concrete veranda,
my father, in his chair,
drifted into the night

away from grey suburban England
to Adriatic olive groves and fields
of gigantic sunflowers.
To mulberry orchards – purply-black
juice bursting out of skins.
To vineyards in sloping rows
like ropes tugging us
down to the shiny
blue ribbon
of the sea.

He’d swim there for hours as a boy,
as a man. In shallow water he taught
us how to find tiny clams, our knees
sinking in the fine sand, and store
them in our mouths until they bulged
with so many loose teeth. Back
on shore we pried them open
with a knife tip – the slick
briny membranes contained
the ocean.

He breathed the sea into my lungs
those nights - its restless tide pools -
as he sat there, motionless.
His cigarette burned to a grey
hollow tube, to his fingers.
He never returned
to the sea.

Giraffes Make No Sound

at all, a friend back from safari
in Kenya mentions. Later we learn
scientists discovered an inaudible

hum after a decade of research,
but at that moment our heads bob
with surprise on the screen.

And I can’t figure it out.
How had I lived this long – seen
for myself how they hinge down

at the river after a jerky ebb and flow
on spindly legs across the bush –
without knowing the muscular

gliding mast of their necks
held such a terrible secret? They
can’t cry out if attacked,

can’t grunt or scream. Then
I’m hushed by images I create of torn
muffled throats and silent, solitary pain.

His body - both swollen and hollow -
keeping a secret. My father hadn’t
spoken for days and why,

a mystery. Not since he began
to think his bed was a boat
and he was drifting in the ocean

further and further away.
In that silent hour, from the other
place he already inhabited, he turned

to look at me, on his chapped
lips - a smile! Suddenly,
there he was.

And there I was, too.
I knew – before an ambulance
came to gather him up

in nets of tubes –
that smile was note in a bottle,
that it would wash up among

cracked shells and crushed cans,
and press its faint music
to my skin again and again

when he was gone. After, I turn
it over in my mind, how it’s just
like us to wonder

what it must be like,
unable to utter any sound
when you’re dying.

And not —
what if you never got to hear
your own song?

Arches

Time hole-punched
the red rock where juniper logs
lie bleached and arthritic
in milkweed
and goldenrod.

A son helps his mother
up to join a waiting group,
his movements so thick
with care —
a sacrament
is in their joined
hands, in his look
a stolen prayer
to fold her in
their number,
keep her safe
there.

Sandstone frames
the dense blue ravens
wade through
before
they sink: holes
the bright shadows of tears
that upwelled, tore
through rock
three hundred million
years ago. Sand on the wind,
ice
wedge in
the fractures,
hollow out the mass
once there.

Too much gone
and the arch
collapses
leaving stacks that bow.

They embrace, squeeze
the air for what’s not
there –
the space between
their leaning bodies
says: another,
carved away
already.