Sicily, a poem by David Garyan

photo by Emanuele Ventura

Sicily

For my friends Emanuele and Valentina. Sabbinirica.

Not every bad thing comes to harm you.

—Sicilian proverb

Gazing from the very toe of Italy,

where the monument

of Vittorio Emanuele III

sticks out like an overgrown nail,

Sicily at last reveals herself—

a bride in a matriarchal society,

and still she resists

taking off her veil.

The island is a window

no one cares to look out of,

but stealing a glance inside

is like unlocking your lover’s diary—

no, it’s like picking the lock

of her flat without permission—

knowing she won’t mind.

There are no secrets here,

only mysteries—

if you can simply imagine

theaters without backstages.

And neither are there plans or designs,

only dreams and ideas—

if you can just picture

conductors without rehearsal halls.

Best of all, there are no questions,

only curiosity and attraction—

if you can envision cooks

who have recipes but no teachers.

This is the land of directors

who let their actors be themselves.

This is the sea of dancers

who never follow their choreographers.

And still, I must ask:

How many feet

have trudged the black

streets of Catania paved

with the angry voice of Etna?

How many eyes in Ortygia

have witnessed time purloin

the rocks of Apollo’s Temple?

How many hands no longer

know the way marble was formed

inside Palermo's chiesa del Gesù?

And what else are my questions

besides parachutes—

the ones which never open

for those who must fall

from the cliffs of time?

If men could only

have compasses—

or any tool to make them see the ways

of their futile pursuits,

if women could just have

babies they had no

problem abandoning,

if children could simply

remember the world— to know it like old

people who never left

their places of birth,

I would know the shores

of your land have no meaning;

I would know the echoes

of your wheat fields are barren;

I would know the songs

your daughters and sons sing

weren’t passed down by their parents,

but in time the mountains have stood,

and they've done this like performers who never

got tired of bowing;

the waters have walked

like philosophers

who could find clarity,

and all this without seeking truth;

the winds kept on speaking your name

even when ships were forgetting your ports.

Sicily, what more can be said?

Like reading old books rescued from fires,

the only answers are questions.

Who planted this earth in the water?

And how did people’s roots

grow so long for them not to forget

how the ocean tastes?

All that separates you from Italy

is the distance on which a bridge

can be built but yet none exist—

and maybe it’s better this way.

Let your body be yours

and may it embrace all those

who embark in your arms.

But keep the steel hands

of humanity away,

for the metals and stones

that fashion connections

are precisely the matters

which also build cages and walls.

Let your land be a bazaar

to which every culture

can bring their spices and herbs.

Let strangers be like friends

cut off by oceans—

the ones who rarely speak to each

other yet have so much in common;

let their flavors be mixed

in the most radiant way;

and still, it's hard to forget the hands

which take more than they give.

The way thirsty Bedouins

won’t renounce the deserts—

plains of sand which hand them no water,

so I imagine no other

path but the sea leading to you.

Forgive the waves inside me,

which arrive like guests

bearing no gifts,

but recede like messengers

who’ve brought you good news.

Forgive the droughts in my ideas,

which catch you like good friends

who talk far too much,

but always initiate the farewell.

Forgive the gusts in my speech

which rush like thieves to your door,

but walk away like parents

who’ve given advice.

Forgive the avalanches in my depression,

which pull you down

like drowning children,

but release you like mountains—

rocks of time whose slopes are so gentle.

Tell me how I can be with you

and still let you be free.

To respect your past

is to love you like a scholar;

to admire your future

is to worship you like a seducer.

What lover’s eyes

truly see in the present?

Like destroyed bridges

whose ends no longer meet,

either they wallow

in the mistakes of history

or become trapped

by the hereafter’s seduction.

As miners may forget how dark

the blue sky gets at night,

so I approached Messina’s shores.

Passing the golden Madonnina,

I didn’t hear the slightest echo

of my homeland’s calling.

And gazing at the Virgin Mary’s Latin blessing—

still so strange to me then—

I realized, in time, the importance

of keeping memories you’ve forgotten.

Why must the future be a graveyard

where promises are buried?

And why is the past a hospital

where only sick children are born?

Walking down Via Garibaldi,

I saw your Moreton Bay figs.

Like soldiers who aren’t afraid

to die for their country,

they stood like men afraid

of dying for nothing—

their branches yearned for the sky

and their roots tempted the underworld.

And while the ruins near Largo San Giacomo

were rigid like agnostics at a crossroad,

the grass around them bloomed

like fields no one had stepped on.

Still, could it be that neither

living nor dying matters

that much anymore?

Poverty is a diamond begging

to become a wedding ring;

wealth is the same diamond

selling its body on the street.

Every beggar asking for change

next to Messina Cathedral revealed something. And what was this revelation?

Nothing but the knowledge of how slowly seconds

will move when even

the faithful won’t feed you.

Every penny given to God

showed me how quickly Sundays

can pass—how fast the world moves when there's enough hell

in your pockets to bribe the watchmaker.

And yet, what else could I realize

standing next to your clock tower?

The stones rested like dead pharaohs

surrounded by servants—

those who could no longer serve them;

time moved like wealth

that couldn’t make them wealthy.

Having never been rich

nor been a beggar,

it was hard to appreciate

both the edifice’s opulence

and the bodily decay it led us towards.

What else could I become

but a musician after silence in cities?

Who else could I be but a luthier who can’t stand

the silence of a forest—

that forest where the best woods

for his instruments grow?

What more could I do

besides stand there like a statue

history was bound to disown in the future?

At once, when the bells rang

in Piazza Duomo,

I forgot the definition

of an island.

The way some artists

in small villages

have already painted

every resident’s portrait,

I suddenly felt alone

when all faces became familiar.

Like places you’ve never been,

their anger and smiles

had strange contours and textures;

their glances were like rumors

about distant lands— distant lands you've read about but whose presence you don't really believe in;

their bodies moved like fairytales

even children question—

and it was hard right then

to ignore the awareness

of death on every expression.

The sudden urge to leave

the island yet remain in Sicily

haunted me like a reality—

no, it was a nightmare

I didn’t want to wake up from.

Ecstasies of the past;

miseries of the future;

and always, always, always,

the present’s monotony—

or perhaps monotony's presence flying over me like the bluest

sky on the Winter Solstice;

as lovers who shun people

in favor of ideas,

I’ve already seen Etna

covered in snow—

although my eyes

haven’t witnessed it.

I’ve already sensed how cold

the Tyrrhenian Sea can get—

although my skin

hasn’t felt it.

From the steps

of Cefalù Cathedral,

I looked upon men and women—

flesh and blood no different from me;

yet, these beings neither knew

who I was nor did they want to know;

it’s hard to describe the relief

which confined me right then—

every thought was an umbrella

in a future with no rain;

every smell was the red lipstick

worn by a woman long overdue for a kiss;

every sound was a wine glass—

the one held by a man tired

of drinking alone;

every face was a portrait

drawn by bad artists;

every street was paved

by people who’d never traveled.

There was nothing else

I could do but weep without tears;

like hunters who feel guilty

when they kill to survive,

I took my heart out of its frame,

cut the empathy into six pieces,

and loaded it in a revolver—

my finger ready to fire

when the last ounce of air

ran out within me.

Yet, there are mysteries left

in the gloom of your ruins; there's light enough in your mosaics—

so much, in fact, they still blind all those who

look at them long enough;

meanwhile the rotten abbey

overlooking the sea

is left to damnatio memoriae.

But the past is nevertheless strange. It grows like weeds

in a garden where all plants

are thought sacred.

Likewise, the future dies

in the beds of unwanted plans—

always conceived in the absence

and presence of love.

Still, the sky is a place

where no one goes to sleep tired—

the white pillows you witness

have never once borne

the world’s weight;

no, it’s not true.

Looking out at the endless

water from Capo Marchiafava’s Bastion,

I still couldn’t escape the sense

of finality—the end that biology

had planted inside me.

The mountains I beheld were no longer majestic;

in fact they were no different

than turtles hiding

in their shells—

even their summits

were crowns of disgraced kings.

While nature’s castles

could shield us forever—

protect us from its own storms,

they had only the power

to do this for so long as we lived.

There’s no empathy

in the waves which bring

dead sailors back to the shore.

There’s no love in a storm

speeding up a ship’s return home. And so I could do nothing.

I could only hope to escape from the depths

where life had emerged—

depths where the hope to survive didn't exist.

So did your streets filled with tourists

suddenly call to me.

I’d grown tired of being

in a church inside which there was none.

It was, at this moment, that my eyes

had witnessed so much of God’s water—

and so plenty it was they could cry at every funeral and birth still to come.

Right then, it felt both natural

and wrong to believe—to have faith

in the belief that the world belonged to no one—

that like a bad dream leaving a corpse,

it both arrived from nowhere

but also came from a past,

a past that’s ceased to exist.

Like a priest confessing his sins,

I’d lost the power

to be surrounded by people.

Ambition, greed, love, rapture,

misery, fortune, freedom, and fate,

all this no longer seemed divisible—

like conjoined twins, but not just any.

Conjoined twins who’d become sworn

enemies by trying

to follow diverging goals.

Among the restaurants

and souvenir shops,

the churches, and coffee shops,

I stumbled upon Porta Pescara

and walked through it—

as if, just, to be born again.

Once more, there was the sea,

but also the priest still

full of doubts.

There would be no confession today—

I entered the water, and I did this not intending to swim—

only to wash my baptism

away from my skin.

It was like forgetting

the page on which you stopped

reading a book—

the one you won’t come back to again.

So did I search in vain,

though not without purpose, for a feeling to place

between these ordeals I had written.

Like throwing white flags

from the roof of a burning skyscraper,

there was nothing left to surrender.

I’d reached every height

and now the ability to fly

was no longer enough.

Only a bird that could sleep

in the air may have helped me right then.

And yet, nowhere did life seem

more precious—nowhere was it much

more alive than inside Palermo's Capuchin Catacombs.

I witnessed a mother

pushing her stroller

for all the skeletons to see. This, I understood, is how common people teach history.

And I realized the child

itself wasn’t crying. This, I understood, is how archaeologists are born. There were no questions I had, except maybe one:

Why did only dead faces

express anguish and joy here?

No canyon was wide enough—

not one could hold a newborn river and a dried-up one at the same time.

The deceased didn’t scare me

so much as the baby did.

The child was like an explorer—

the one that knows how long he must walk

but has yet to make the first step,

I could easily fathom the distance—

the grasp under which my own body

might willingly drown,

and yet, the mind that’s eager

to live only wants to survive— under duress it cannot measure

such philosophies as these.

Just let me be free—

like biologists in love

with man-made forests,

like chemists who only

eat natural foods,

like old men smoking

in front of hospitals.

There’s no need to worry,

especially like a doctor who gets sick

with the sickness he studied.

Enlightenment, after all,

is just a small town— or merely big city, if you so wish— where every library

is only open to children,

and each of those cities and towns

are nothing but a hell where the fires go out on Sunday.

Is it not true that you can't

leave the wonders

of Santa Maria dell’Ammiraglio

and minutes later enter

the most tumbledown neighborhood?

Take me into your arms,

you great city of Phoenicians,

Carthaginians, Arabs, and Greeks—

where else but in the Cappella Palatina

could mosaics shine brighter?

Where else is it often hard

to distinguish your ancient ruins

from modern decay?

Where else can you really

feel God in a church

where no one is worshipping?

And where else can you stop believing

in Him just seconds later— when you pass drunks sleeping

near the doorsteps of Christ?

There’s no point in revealing

how much I love you.

It'd be less absurd to measure

degrees of affection with a thermometer.

Instead, let me do this— let me tie my hate

with shoelaces and leave

it in the closet;

this way my mind can walk

barefoot on your streets;

this way it can guide people only

to your most beautiful places.

Yet, like those with poor vision

reaching for their glasses each morning,

I must take my heart out of its drawer.

I must wear it to face every sunrise.

And like newspapers which never ignore

the flaws of a city they’ve been seduced by—

I must close my eyes and read

what they’re telling me:

Your piss-ridden alleys smell

like old picture frames—

those which have held nothing

but photos of loathsome people for years.

Your aging tenements

are like young orphans—

those everyone prays and feels sorry for,

but no one wants to adopt.

The cracks in your sidewalks

are faults that have no energy—

no brawn, even, to cause any more trouble,

yet everyone still avoids them.

Your graffiti-stained walls

are empty tubes of paint—

the ones even artists

no longer want,

but you keep them anyways.

Still, every brick that was homesick

for the place it came from,

every window that stayed

closed in August,

every street sign saying

you’re going the wrong way,

every lamp lit up like the eyes

of old men who never married,

and every balcony reaching out

like a hand afraid to help you—

all of that was a bouquet of flowers.

No, it was bouquet of old flowers mixed not just with red roses of love

but also white lilies of mourning.

My eyes saw your body

like two costly wedding rings—

in a ceremony where only one

spouse was marrying for love.

Your own men and women

looked at me—stared at me like my heart was a magnet, a magnet in the hands of a beggar. And that's how your men and women were wrong,

for my heart was really a horseshoe—

the one from the hoof of a beast

tired of pulling its own weight.

Won’t you tell me what goes

on behind the curtain

of your glances and stares?

Maybe one day

you’ll show me ... no, maybe you'll take

me to the widest part between where your

questions and judgments lie, and, here, maybe, you'll go on to show me how

you plan to build a bridge connecting the two—

the two banks of this river prone to flooding.

In the short time we had together,

I still passed Quattro Canti—

many times did I do this yet never

once did you open the door,

open it like a host

that knows who’s knocking.

The grandiosity of your

cathedral was too much for me—

I was impressed like a hermit,

a recluse who’d only seen people

for the first time in years.

And still, I approached the edifice. I went to it like a son who'd stolen

from his mother and now wanted forgiveness.

The way lamps beg for darkness,

just to be less alone in the light,

I longed to be one

with the beige stones—

their skin so unlike my own.

Would I find strangers

who might treat

me like family at last,

or did I just want to curse

relatives who embraced

me like a stranger?

Your stones listened

with the ears of monks,

and spoke with the tongues of crowds—

no sum of silence or noise was ever enough.

How I waited for a prayer

to ring out from your dead walls,

just so my corpse too could live again.

How I yearned for less light

so my troubled thoughts could sleep.

Like watching a magical coin

always land on its edge,

I could no longer tolerate

the presence of God—

His fingerprints

appeared on every stone;

and, likewise, I could easily smell

the devil’s spirit here to erode them.

Finally, the way cold reptiles

are forced to move by the sun’s hand,

I found the means to leave—

there was no means of escape, except the decision that I must do this.

And still, that choice was a blessing.

For there seemed to be more peace

in the heat of Villa Bonanno—

with its palm trees swaying

like drunks who are bothering no one;

there was far greater silence

in the noise of Mercato di Ballarò;

the fish, lemons, oranges,

and every meat lying under the sun—

all of it imprisoned the ears like angry wardens,

like guards forcing the nose to stand straight and listen.

The way guilt tends to sweat

even when it’s cold,

so is smell the best evidence

of a life led with gusto.

Dead are your sculptures of the past

who were born motionless to begin with.

Dead are your divine kings

and so too their castles.

What more could their bodies

and walls have asked for?

What more except the heavenly right

to become dust—

to be as speechless

in the wind’s presence

as the peasants they once ruled?

Dead are the sermons and prayers of churches, of sanctuaries who’ve turned

their walls into museums—

just like finely carved candles

you dare to behold only in daytime.

Dead, too, are your traditions and myths,

which burn like cigarettes—more like ashes in the mouths of young people trying to quit smoking.

How relieved I felt, at last,

to escape this passing—to stroll

the charcoal-brushed

streets of Catania.

The only things still alive

in Sicily are the waves

molding every dead rock,

and the mountains

which keep causing destruction—

yet, only Etna is like the Christ

that refuses to be crucified.

Yes, you, Chalcidian city

on the Ionian sea—

how many volcanic floods

must arrive? How many must come

to cleanse all your triumphs and sins?

What rain will it take?

What people must cry to put out

the flames with their tears? There's no sorrow big enough to usher in such joy.

Nowhere else have I felt

the warmth from fires

that no longer burn.

Nowhere else have I heard

the screams from pain

that no longer exists.

Nowhere else have I tasted

the blood from a wound

that healed long ago.

The ruins of your ancient

theaters are more than just matter—

I heard the applauses and cheers

still frozen within the volcanic rocks.

Like houses from which the future

had moved out long ago,

did it really matter that I was here?

And what tiring monologues

did people witness in these very stands?

They’ve become archives no one

wants to visit anymore.

But where’s the fame and the grand

ovations which the good actors won here?

It’s all remembered like a passing

remark you didn’t hear clearly.

Where are the petty arguments

and disputes that occurred on these seats?

Like dust inside a coffin,

they never left the stands.

Where’s the boredom of one spectator

and the excitement of another? And who cares where it is if that sorrow

and joy was felt two strangers— two strangers sitting next to each other?

They met, then, on a pilgrimage to oblivion,

walking there for different reasons.

Where? Where? Where?

The Catanese sun had no answers

and neither did the breeze,

always crawling in from the Ionian Sea.

There was only clarity—

nothing but godforsaken clarity

answering my own questions,

waiting for me like a pendulum

in a narrow corridor,

expecting me to recite

a monologue from the stands,

just so the dead actors below

could cease moving parallel to their walls—

just so they could see some entertainment at last.

And so it was hard not to yearn

for the roar of Etna again—

to be free of humanity, to be free of humans,

and yet to live in a town,

or even a city, if that's what it must be, where you could cross

the street without waiting,

where you could wait

without ever being late,

where you could ignore time

and never be punished—

all in a place without punishment,

yet in a place where people still followed the rules,

in a place without laws

you didn’t have to obey,

in a place where people

who didn’t obey them also didn’t exist.

Still, the purity of movement,

the purity of action springs from hands—

hands which destroy and rebuild their own monuments.

Meanwhile, the swamps of remembrance,

and so too the swamps of reflection— both move like rabbits

which never cease to be hunted.

Morals perceive a blaze

like it’s a foreigner, a refugee refusing

to shed the smoke of his culture.

And destruction treats the same flames

like immigrants forced

to forget their homeland,

but also the ones forbidden to burn

their old language and clothes.

Truly, memory is a wooden boat

trying not to sink on infernal waters.

And yet, how many times did Etna’s voice

command the Cathedral of Saint Agatha?

How many times did it compel the rocks to throw every new robe

into the fire—only to begin

clothing her ruins again? And to do this with rocks that knew only one word: destruction.

In the same way we stand

on the ocean’s shore,

never questioning why waves

follow each other without hesitation—

I looked at Bellini’s grave,

then at the walls which protected it,

knowing that like echoes

which, at once, die so quickly

yet take forever to fade,

the maestro’s music

would stay young even in silence.

Every note was a young ripple, every ripple an old wave, and you could sense it—

you could feel the skin

of your coast only

for seconds before it returned home;

meanwhile, the undying stone

of the composer’s tomb

could always be buried, but not just in any way—

it had to be covered in Etna’s graveyards of lava.

The earliest morning in the world

isn’t an artist who rises to the sun before it’s time.

No, the most virgin dawn is an active volcano;

it's thousands of years old yet still keeps

on growing with every expression—

a murmur of silence it can no longer quell.

From the dome of chiesa della Badia di Sant’Agata,

it was futile to look at the hundreds of roofs—

their gentle inclinations were too peaceful;

they evoked bowing monks

lost on the island of contemplation;

it was better to close my eyes

and be like a cup in the desert—

reject hope and yet believe in the future.

No, this city neither asked

for God’s blessing nor tried to run

from the wrath it couldn’t avoid.

Lying on the edge of this dome,

much like a healthy person begging to rest at a hospital,

I came to wonder whether, like men,

volcanoes erupt because

of the maladies which afflict them,

or if they cried like children

who couldn’t comprehend their own sadness.

And likewise, I wanted to know

about humanity’s suffering.

Was it born from the womb

that could see its own sickness,

or did the pain comes from elsewhere—

from our fear to abandon the forest

which fears its own laws.

What more should the depths

of a clean river say? What more should they do besides seize

people who don’t cherish its danger—

trap them inside it and never let go?

Why should the weight

of upright trees

not come down on people—

on the backs of people who cut them without remorse?

And how much more sense

can a blazing volcano make?

What more sense can be in it when its mouth speaks of love

in a language you don’t understand?

No, Etna, my ears heard you like parallel roads

going in opposite directions.

My eyes saw you like a married couple

trying to avoid confrontation,

yet by avoiding it both sides cannot speak.

My feet wanted to approach you

like two bodies of water—two rivers

in lands that hate each other,

each stream flowing

into the same lake, a body of water

whose depths loved them both.

And yet, my heart tried protecting itself.

It built a library around its desires

and let only the illiterate inside.

Like surgeons who find no soul in the flesh,

like lovers who see no history under the covers,

like loggers who notice no past under the bark,

like runners who can’t face defeat at the finish line,

I turned my sight away from your heights

and focused it on the shores of Syracuse.

I could feel the Gelsomineto waters no other way.

Only detectives searching for answers—

and this outside the margins of their profession—

could’ve understood me right then.

Still, contemplation alone is never enough;

it’s a hotel room you have no trouble sleeping in,

but the view from the window reminds

you too much of home;

it’s a movie theater you can easily sneak into,

but all the films being shown

have unresolved endings.

And so, I did the only thing left to do. I climbed onto the rugged cliff.

And I saw how from there young kids

were jumping without too much reflection.

The desire for childhood seized me.

It held on like the last seconds of a family reunion—

the one that happens every ten or so years.

Still, my train was departing

and without this farewell

the clock couldn’t restart again.

How I wanted to kill every philosopher inside me,

to throw every last desire for contemplation

into the flames of action—

to grow younger,

and not for the sake of youth alone,

but to discover once more irresponsibility,

to regain creativity, to have, yet again that stubborn commitment, the young instinct

that kept me from turning my head

at the sound of each voice—

when every note tried to make

me go its own way.

Like an architect I dreamed of buildings—

those that trespassed the mind’s borders, but like an architect I couldn't

go past the edges of blueprints.

That's how the height I had to leap from

was both too high and not high enough.

How did these kids overcome their fear?

They must've been hostages—captives

who'd remembered the wealth of their families,

and that's how they lost all sense of panic,

all with the knowledge their ransom would come.

Or, were they like pilots

down to their last ounce of fuel,

flying above calm waters,

carrying no one on board except themselves?

Oh, God, if you have any sense left,

take away this wisdom rushing over me;

it’s the same burden of victory—

that burden only guilty defendants feel when they’re acquitted, let free

of crimes they’ve in fact committed.

Let me jump from this cliff and fall finally—

both indifferent to gravity like a rock

and fully aware of my fate like a physicist.

Too long have my hands held suitcases

which didn’t belong to me—

my back always facing the horizon.

Like a weatherman gambling

with snow in the summer,

I waited for a chance to cheat

the dealer of fate out of his winnings.

And still, what a blessing it is to lose,

to resign one’s self with the same firmness,

the straight resolution cast into the direction of train tracks. That's how it'd feel best to go on,

to renounce freedom like a road

which never diverges,

but always gives

you the chance to walk back.

Then, like a thunderbolt

which lingers for a second too long,

I could no longer distinguish

daytime from night—

I jumped without forcing

my body to make a decision.

Still, the world returned

when I crashed into the water;

commitments, plans, and hopes

took their usual seats in the theater—

the playhouse of existence where those who paid the most

always got the best view of the farce known as life.

What else could my thoughts be but a million heretics

searching for their own shepherds?

What more did my skin have but a hundred lovers

holding the leash of my youth—

that rope of recklessness ready to let go when I could no longer walk?

What other point did my life

have besides the sunrise I never woke up for,

and the sunset that will surely send me to sleep?

Like a ladder that’s taller than anything God

ever left in the lowlands,

I gazed at the Temple of Apollo in Ortygia,

unable to see the greatness

of these ruins in comparison to me.

And yet, I felt small.

My humanity was a river

that could flood anytime,

but the engineers of essence

kept building their homes next to me,

making nature more mortal.

Was it really this curse I feared?

To be buried yet never allowed

to become eminent ruins—

to be so sacred that no archaeologist

would ever dare uncover my history?

And still, how weak the hands

of science alone really are,

for its grasp has no greater strength

to lift our corpses than those of religion.

At that moment I knew these rocks

had changed from a shrine of humanity—

indeed from the tenets of all faith into the headstone for civilization.

What else did men’s hands carve

into this unyielding marble? What else

except the desire to be with women

who could bear them no children?

What did their handsome faces look like?

What were their names?

The future can forget everything—

even make family fade from a blood stain.

The way maps never tell you who lives on a street,

how it smells, whether there are cracks,

let alone if there’s danger lurking ahead,

so I cursed the intelligence

designed by the charlatans above.

The blood in my hands stopped flowing, so dead in direction, much like a salesman

with no more doors left to knock on—

I wanted to curse the heavens

and the very dirt they created,

but all the anger in my voice

was a piano tuned to the same note.

My body had been reduced to octaves—

the pitch of every organ working

towards one goal.

It was meaningless to picture

the devotion, faith, and sorrow alike— the misery and ecstasy

which had passed by these walls. And what were these walls?

Nothing but stones that weren’t ruins once.

But now, like farmers who’d never

suffered a drought—and like those same

farmers who still moved to the city,

only the death even decay

had abandoned remained here.

There was no other hope

but to keep building shrines—

always bigger than ourselves— just so the demons above

could rejoice in our torment.

Did we not fashion

the pyramids of Egypt, only to discover the poison that killed their architects?

Did we not raise the theaters of Greece, only to shame the great minds that spoke there?

Did we not build Rome's aqueducts only to make conquest an option?

And yet, these things will fade, then disappear, all before nature's own toxic creatures and plants go extinct.

What, then, do I make of your

fate, Ortygia, you island of Sicily?

Like you, I want to be surrounded

by loneliness and still belong to someone;

but go on, there’s nothing you can do to save me—

I refuse to leave hope alone;

it's like smoke trapped in a room

without windows.

I follow the footsteps of despair,

much like an echo trying to disprove

rumors about itself.

I turn away from compassion. Because all I am is a heavy wrench—

the one in the hands of a child

who neither has the strength

nor the knowledge to use it.

Like a critic enjoying terrible plays, I get along with impatience,

just to write bad reviews.

I compromise with anger,

and this like a Cyclops who agrees

to sleep with one eye open.

When I gazed at the lava

stone shores of Aci Trezza, I felt only one thing:

My body became the anchor

for ships—those which had embarked

on voyages to find the ocean.

My mind became the tent

for Bedouins—the ones who still

went out in search of the desert.

And this time, I saw neither

the dead mountain,

nor did I feel the living

volcano inside it.

Like a freshwater fish

exiled to a salty sea,

I was both at home

yet also yearned

for the place of my birth.

Take my soul, Etna, and throw

it into the fire, throw it into the sea—

do what you must but be sure to destroy it,

and if you can't do even that, consign it to the lowest circle of hell,

but stop prolonging my doubt

with the punishment only you can inflict.

Like immigrants who’ve abandoned

their relatives to go live abroad,

I wanted to be a faraway island

with a hundred bridges leading to it.

Like jurors whose bias helps them reach

the right verdict before the trial even starts,

it was hard to be surrounded

by water being poisoned by doubt.

And still, picturing the mainland

that wasn’t visible from here,

I wondered if it’s better

for an island to stay near the continents—

all while refusing all handshakes

which are hard to let go of.

For that’s what you are, Sicily.

Like psychologists listening

to their friends complain,

like math professors who fall

in love with poor gamblers,

like lawyers laughing

at commoners breaking the law,

like explorers who can’t relate

to those who ask for directions,

like photographers who won’t marry

people with bad memories,

like privates who warn the elderly

about the dangers of smoking,

like sociologists who are never

relaxed at large parties,

like sous-chefs who dread

being invited over for dinner,

like insurance agents telling

their kids not to fear earthquakes,

like tax collectors who preach

the gospel of generosity,

like librarians whose friends

never pay back what they owe,

I felt the textures of Sicily’s body—

beheld the shape of every spirit

in the wide-open yet wary

eyes of Valentina and Emanuele.

And so, I left the island

like a postal worker—

the one who’d purposely forgotten

to deliver a sad letter

addressed to a friend.