Mr. Nicosetti from the Toronto Centrale

Institue of Italian thumbs, is weeping inside

the pages of a notebook he wrote when he was ten

years old under the Italian Alps, and poverty-stricken he

tells me.

 

His wife is weeping, his house is made of gingerbread

with a madonna for a door-knocker. I am the first to

hear his tears tonight; his politics is something

 

inescapable. He talks up a storm; he is all pathos

with an eye for antipasto. He is the centre of his

community, he tells me; he has taught children to sing

the alpine songs, because Italian is a beautiful thing

 

and enriches.       Outside, three thousand miles of wind

is bleating against three thousand miles of ocean;

 

somewhere in a country like a boot, something goes on

that is nothing like “Il Ponte Vecchio”, or Gigli

or Michelangelo.They are building Rome in one

 

day in Toronto, and it will disappear with

the snows. There is a country the size of

 

my skull in me; I fill it with loves ones

and three thousand poems.            When I go to

 

heaven I will have a passport made of hairs and a drop

of blood, and no one will ask me the spelling of my

name, and I will be bothered by wild and significant things.

Originally published in White Wall Review 7 (1983)