Cent’ Anni

Rhymes on my grandmother’s 100th birthday.

Time came with you on the immigrant ship
The wished-for century of luck and hope
You carried within you the length of the trip

A resilient, intricately coiled rope
Whose strength has served you for a hundred years.
Just like you, grandmother, to take the trope

We use to celebrate and offer cheers
And make it literally, day by day;
In my eyes that is how your life coheres

Across clever decades that swept away
Worlds your grandmother and grandfather knew.
No map-scaling chronicle can convey

The intimate history you labored through,
Placing hours like stones in time’s long dry wall
Never, by nature, either fast or true.

From San Marco in Lamis you recall
The distant accident that led you here:
A church’s construction, its ceiling’s fall—

The story finally becoming clear
After I’d listened for the dozenth time;
Family inheritance is slow by ear.

The threat of punishment without a crime
Alarmed your father, who was forced to flee:
He had warned the pastor that sand and lime

Would need a few days to dry properly;
The pastor, insisting that God knew best
Intoned a novena despite the plea

That the plaster would never stand sound’s test.
Two faithful perished in the broken church;
Your father left home to escape arrest

Warned by the mayor of the pastor’s search,
With caribinieri, for an earthly blame.
A wife and family, left in the lurch,

Waited out wild fortune till it grew tame.
He made his way to Canada from France,
And on to America; then you came.

All drama settles into circumstance
Depositing silences in its wake
For the gods speak quickly in tongues of chance

Spinning new narratives to overtake
The foreseeable future’s universe.
Then—lucky? unlucky?—we’re forced to break

The past’s long sentences; the present’s terse,
Barking out an epigrammatic fate
Whatever long futures our fears rehearse.

On the ear of a child, seven or eight,
The present’s language made its blunt demands,
Rewording the world the senses relate,

Stripping your girlhood of the dreamed commands
A heart can issue to its native tongue;
Immigrant muses must have strong hands

For the soul’s faint poetry’s too far-flung
From the given body of the here-and-now,
On whose skeleton homesick hopes are hung.

To such formulations you’d never bow,
Your words have been tempered to harder steel
And tuned to what keynotes the years allow.

Through accented evenings, memories peal
To chase the dull hearing that troubles you;
Your voice rings from its weathered campanile

Tolling old stories, a spirited few,
For your spirit has nowhere else to go:
Your voice hoards the life that your limbs outgrew.

I sit and listen: you, fortissimo,
Deliver the opera years recast
In age’s lonely oratorio,

One long melody that your voice holds fast
And sings as if rattling off prayers by rote,
Raveling the aria of your past

Through joyful and sorrowful anecdote—
Familiar tales of rehearsed commotion
That trace the character which underwrote

A mother’s, a daughter’s, and a wife’s devotion
In decades of domestic mysteries;
Your tales are the relics of spent emotion,

Worn beads strung together in rosaries:
The time you deflected your father’s gun
From the sightline of anniversaries;

A laboring marriage at last begun
And then your nine children, alive with need.
Flour by hundred weight, coal by the ton,

You pile up numbers with an easy speed
Meant to impress me, as indeed it does.
How many more stories are there to feed

My grandchildish appetite for what was?
But of course you keep speaking for your own sake,
Cutting up my questions with a buzz

Of talk to cover the hours’ humming ache.
Legacies, finally, are left to words,
And age tells the truth its heart can’t break:

What life comes down to is a prayer in surds,
Blind faith professing our days are gods,
Though they scatter from us like skittish birds;

We lift a melody against time’s odds
Till it’s lost in the plainchant of the spheres
To which all memory finally nods.

Tonight, unsleeping, you will count your years
In darkness, awaiting dawn’s bulletin;
Then move to a window as new light clears

The space in thin air where our days begin.