Ancient Rites and Mysteries

In Florence, early, a stooped man moves down the alleys
Waiting for the rinds to be set out for the pigeons,
And, at dawn, swallows wheel from the eaves and campaniles
Crying out a call of pain peculiar to this city.
One thinks of the plague that moled through these cellars
Six centuries ago, and of the beggars that begot these beggars
Rolling off their women to shuffle past the merchants’ doors.
Though a sculptor, here and there, may have succeeded
At converting their bald pain into a kind of sorrow,
It lives still, an heirloom of back rooms and old piazzas,
And is first cousin to a suffering I used to think
Belonged to the Midwest alone, where I grew up,
Observing its essential rules: that men edge off
Just when their help is needed most, and that
A person, almost always, will starve before abandon
The land and circumstances of his birth. But more,
I saw that in Florence, too, a woman in a dusty dress
Will sometimes lean against a door she’s leaned against
A thousand times, watching her child chase balking chickens,
And with her darkened teeth will smile
The selfsame smile that I have seen and wondered at
Among the plywood shacks of Kankakee or Peotone.

Copyright Credit: Norman Williams, “Ancient Rites and Mysteries” from The Unlovely Child (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985)