Aach...ye speak like a poet, but ye punch like one too...

PUNCH LIKE A POET

Saturday, May 20, 2006
  
Poem

SPAGHETTI WESTERN

No frying tomatoes stain the air with their fragrance.
She's gone. The apartment door swings open.
His backfiring Vespa parked against the curb below.
He learned Italian to make conversation with her mother
and she's gone. Every scrap of furniture too.
He lights a cigarette, imagines her dark haired cousins
carrying everything down the stairs for her, probably
singing some vulgar medieval folk song where a woman
leaves her dumb foreign husband. His dog's dead too,
curled like a closed parenthesis on the living room carpet.
The hot sun bleeds on the rooftops. Water glitters
like a fever in the bay. He throws his cigarette away
into the street. Cobblestones older than the great-grandfather
of the man who founded the town in Kansas where he was born.
Nothing left in the apartment but sunlight. Scattered
newspapers, broken pasta in the bottom of a drawer.
A tinny radio in the bedroom playing punk rock
in a local dialect he can't quite catch. Two weeks later
when he tracks her down in Salerno she'll swear
the dog was alive, howling as she left and he'll believe her.
But now he curses her in both their languages, lights
another cigarette. The DJ introduces musica americana
and plays Hank Williams. So lonesome he could cry.

# posted by Daniel at 2:40 PM.