Salerno, 1959
Poem by Bernard
Henrie • Photo by Irras Han
 Wind rumples the wine shop canvas like a
mother
throwing off bedclothes– a sign of the late hour and nudge to go home. The waiter is asleep and the owner
looks at his wristwatch while turning a newspaper. The cockatoo rests immobile in his cage, sea-green head tucked under a dark wing. The season changes tonight, or first
thing tomorrow.
I will replace a fan with my English umbrella; the bus queue will form long and orderly as always. Rain squalls will soak my book, my lump of tie will turn sodden as old magazines by the road. For a few more days I will carry your
scarf
in a breast pocket like a tobacco pouch, pass the school where you practiced speaking French, sit at the phonograph with your almost deaf mother – read at the wine shop, elbows on the domino board. If I thought I would see you again tilling a family patch of red chicory, or changing a bathing costume at the river or once again that your journalist’s desk would abut mine, that hope is black smoke rising from a Vatican chimney. |