Always coming out, always coming out.
I wonder sometimes if it’s worth mentioning, for – in the main – I don’t think it is.
But in preparation for the upcoming Page vs Stage battle/slam/rage/WWF Poetry Smack Down, I have had the pleasure of reading Rosanna Licari’s work. She says she likes Robert Lowell. I like Robert Lowell. Oh no! WHAT IF I LIKE ROSANNA. This will make for a terrible battle. Have a little looksee at her poem from her 2010 collection.
Oh yes, what was I coming out about again? Oh yes, I like to READ poetry. Other people’s poetry. Can you freaking believe it?
—
Mediterranean mosaic
Today neither Mother’s story
nor Lowell’s ‘Sailing Home from Rapallo’
brings the azure
of the Gulf of Genoa to mind.
I remember squatting on a balcony floor,
a doll under my arm, as my fingers
trace the grout slowly.
A circle of vermillion flares into petals
of yellow and white. These coloured tesserae,
a contrast to the dull sea of roof tiles below.
A train rattles in the distance and then Rapallo
fades from my memory.
Mother tells me Zio and Zia lived
in a small attic near the centre. Adamo
zigzagged the streets, delivering meat
door-to-door on a bicycle.
When we visited, I called for Daria
as I clambered up the steps of the tenement,
holding Mother’s hand.
She concludes
the balcony was the best thing
about the place.
Memory is made of fragments or perhaps
lies in the interstices?
But I try to make meaning of the pieces,
and rack through tile shards in this half-light of doubt.
© 2010 Rosanna Licari. From An Absence of Saints, University of QLD Press, 2010.
eleanor j jackson 