Standing on the Bridge at Dolceacqua

At forty, I studied the mirror. I poked my mouth to free a trapped grain

of hamburger, and a tooth broke off  between my fingers. I felt nothing.

The dentist said: The tooth is dead. The root is dead. The X-rays show signs

of trauma to the lower jaw. What happened here? I said: Donald DeBlasio.

Donald DeBlasio punched me in the mouth. I was fifteen. My lip split,

my skull clanged, and my body smacked the floor like a mannequin

in a store looted by rioters. He stood over me and grinned

as he would grin at me for the rest of my life. Whenever I saw

him, in the hallway at school or on the street, he would pump

his right fist in my face, slowly curling an invisible barbell.

He was a centurion guarding the last outpost of the empire,

another Sicilian or Calabrese fleeing Brooklyn for Valley Stream,

Long Island, escaping the barbarians who sacked Rome, back

from the dead in 1972 to steal their cars, torch their houses,

piss in their swimming pools, stab the boys, and kiss the girls.

I was a barbarian drifting far from his tribe, a Puerto Rican

without a knife in hand or a leather jacket ablaze in gang colors.

Everybody understood, even the teacher who glanced away the day

I was late and sat on the floor, so the front row could take turns

jabbing a shoe in my spine. I refused to worship their gods, Jesus

on the crucifix or the Yankees in the sacred arena of the Stadium,

or the football deity who could bench press 300 pounds and slammed

me into a locker whenever he saw me. He never said a word to me.

I never said a word to him. I learned to swallow blood and words.

For years, I would mimic their rooster strut, the sneering lip stuck out,

the bellowing battle cry of ba fangool. I rooted against Rocky in all

the Rocky movies, cheering his choreographed pratfalls to the canvas.

When they rushed out the door of the pizza joint to gawk at the booming

car wreck on the corner, leaving my eggplant parm sub to burn black

in the oven, I called them goombahs and swore never to return.

I am sixty. The words flow over the wrinkled stone of my brain:

Dolceacqua, sweet water, fresh water, River Nervia in the province

of Imperia, region of Liguria. I stand on the bridge at Dolceacqua,

the same stone arch painted by Monet more than a century ago.

She contemplates the water gushing below the bridge, and I watch

at her shoulder to see the river as she sees the river, poet, teacher,

amati, like amada in Spanish, the word for beloved. Her mother’s name

is Giovio, Calabrese from New Jersey, her grandfather a stonemason

before the beam rammed his head and the stroke crippled his right hand,

her great-grandmother a girl sewing buttons onto blouses who escaped

the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, as others leapt, hand in hand, eyes shut,

from the ninth floor. I can no longer remember the curses in the poetry

of Shakespeare and Donald DeBlasio. She takes my hand, and leads me

across the bridge to the ruins of the castle on the other side of the river,

through the labyrinth of stone, up to the jagged battlements, where we

listen to the silence of the builders, and the birds, and the silence again.