{"id":650,"date":"2017-05-01T14:53:02","date_gmt":"2017-05-01T14:53:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/italianamericana.ysu.edu\/wordpress\/?p=650"},"modified":"2017-05-01T14:53:02","modified_gmt":"2017-05-01T14:53:02","slug":"paul-mariani","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/italianamericana\/?p=650","title":{"rendered":"Paul Mariani"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"text-indent:175px\"><span style=\"font-size: medium\"><\/p>\n<ul style=\"line-height:1;text-indent:-3\"><strong>The Beloved Ghosts of Compiano<\/strong><\/span><\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<div style=\"text-indent:30px\">\n<p>Italy, sweet Italy, and the ghosts the very thought of it evokes. They came from Compiano, in the region of Parma, my grandfather and my grandmother, nonno e nonna, back some 120 years ago. First Giuseppe\u2014Joe\u2014age 25, in 1896, then Giulia, with their one-year-old son, Primo, the following year. They came to the new world through Ellis Island and settled in Manhattan, where they were told the streets were paved with gold, though it was my grandfather it turned out who did the paving. Asphalt streets and paths up in Central Park, then tar roofs, until\u2014bull of a man that he was\u2014his lungs gave out.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div style=\"text-indent:30px\">\n<p>They settled on New York\u2019s East Side, first on 59th Street, in the shadow of the Queensboro Bridge, then over to 61st between Second and Third Avenues, until\u2014thanks to Robert Moses\u2014the aging brownstone was torn down to make room for one more exit ramp off the bridge in the 1930s. Their church, Our Lady of Peace on East 62nd Street, was as vital to them as it was to thousands of Catholic families, though it is now closed. They had eleven children, six of whom made it to adulthood. Some died in infancy, and Primo, alas, died after being hit by a drunken truck driver at fourteen. Mary\u2014Mamie\u2014whose girlish image still brings tears to my eyes when I look at the old photo I have of her\u2014died in the Flu Epidemic nearly a century ago in the wake of World War I. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div style=\"text-indent:30px\">\n<p>I was nine months old when my grandfather died and of course cannot remember that big, burly, mustachioed man. My grandmother lived on for another twenty-seven years, and always wore widow\u2019s black. Italian songs, basil-laced spaghetti sauce, polenta, fresh fruit when we could get it, mixed liberally with American Jell-O\u2014lime, lemon, orange. And avocados galore, which my father brought home in bags from the Calavo warehouse over in New Jersey where he worked\u2014thanks to my Uncle Joe\u2014when he\u2019d returned home Ulysses-like, after serving in the U.S. Army as a tank driver and carburetor specialist.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div style=\"text-indent:30px\">\n<p>Walking as a little boy with my father uptown from 51st Street to my father\u2019s old neighborhood, I used to visit with my Uncle John\u2014one of Jimmy Cagney\u2019s gang from the 1920s\u2014who still lived on 61st with his Czech wife, Mary, and their three kids. I don\u2019t ever remember my father talking about poetry, except to recite the line, \u201cAbu Ben Adam (may his tribe increase),\u201d which he\u2019d memorized in the sixth grade, but I do remember him joking with the old men in that French-Italian patois of his where the final vowels of words were often lopped, asking them what George Washington said when he crossed the Delaware into Trenton during the American Revolution. And being a practical man among practical men, his answer was \u201cMa che cazzo, che fa freddo,\u201d which, he told me, translated to \u201cBut oh my poor balls, it\u2019s cold out here.\u201d Once, when I was sixteen and back home from a year in the seminary, he pulled his dump truck over to the side of the road and asked me if it was true that I was writing poems. I said it was true. After a few moments, he said in a defeated voice, \u201cWell, you\u2019re still my son,\u201d started the engine up, and we drove on to work.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div style=\"text-indent:30px\">My dear, bright, optimistic mother, on the other hand, had been a young girl named Harriet Green (formerly Cazimura Szymborski), whose father, Harry, of Russian, Polish, and German stock, had crossed on horseback into Mexico back in 1916 with Pershing\u2019s Cavalry in pursuit of the elusive Pancho Villa, then followed Pershing into France, where he was gassed, though he managed to hang on for another fourteen years. Her mother, Emely Noren, was of Swedish Lutheran stock. It was she who lent me the money to buy an engagement ring for my future bride, Eileen, herself half Irish and half Italian.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div style=\"text-indent:30px\">I am the oldest of seven: four boys and three girls. Does the story sound familiar? It should, for it is a version of the story of so many immigrant families who came to America. And though my parents\u2019 education stopped with the ninth grade because of the Depression, they somehow saw to it that I earned my Ph.D. in English, teaching at places like Colgate and John Jay College (Frank Serpico being one of my students) and Hunter uptown and downtown, before I moved with my wife and three small boys to Massachusetts to teach at UMass\/Amherst for thirty-two years and for the last sixteen years at Boston College.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div style=\"text-indent:30px\">The Dante and Virgil scholar, Allen Mandelbaum, was my beloved mentor and friend at Hunter, and it was his love of Italian poetry which awoke a music so deep within me that it brings me to tears when I think of it. I remember those dancing blue eyes of Giuseppe Ungaretti, when Allen brought the old poet to visit Amherst over forty years ago. There he was, recalling a time sixty years before when he was a private in the Italian army fighting along the Isonzo, looking for a pot-hole in the river where he might bathe quickly, before being picked off by an Austrian sniper:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 150px\"><em>Mi tengo a quest\u2019albero mutilato<br \/>\nabbandonato in questa dolina<br \/>\nche ha il languaore<br \/>\ndi un circo&#8230;.<\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 150px\"><em>This mutilated tree gives<br \/>\nMe support, left in this pot-hole<br \/>\nIt has the bitterness of a circus&#8230;.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>And of course the poet Giovanni Giudici, who read some of my first poems and told me it was time for me to stop serving as an altar boy\u2014i.e., a critic\u2014and take on the priestly mantle of the poet, bless him. <\/p>\n<div style=\"text-indent:30px\">\n<p>For me Italy is a hallowed landscape, flooded with light and fig trees and sepia images of the Val di Taro. At the same time it is of course a very real place, one of many Italian landscapes I have visited over the past forty years. In Italy Italians ask me why I don\u2019t speak the native language with a name like Mariani, and I explain that the language was never spoken at home, though the music of Virgil and Dante and Montale and Ungaretti seems to make up my very DNA, and I feel as much at home in Florence and Sulmona as I do in Milano and Lago di Garda. But then I always carry a postcard image of Italy in my heart here in Montague, Massachusetts, staking tomatoes and thinning my Italian parsley, rosemary, and oregano as the sun grows stronger and the thrushes sing.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div style=\"text-indent:200px\"><span style=\"font-size: large\"><\/p>\n<ul style=\"line-height:1;text-indent:-3\"><strong>Work<\/strong><\/span><\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 150px\">And so it went, day after day, the four of us, inching<br \/>\nout from the shallow end of the empty Empire<br \/>\nSwimming Pool, the ritual of gearing up to sandblast,<br \/>\npreparing to engorge our peck\u2019s worth of aqua metal dust.<br \/>\nWorse was the glare off the rain-scum slop congealing<br \/>\nat the deeper end, the sun\u2019s reflection blinding us whenever<br \/>\nwe looked back. In silence I pushed on, without even<br \/>\nBo Diddley\u2019s music or the King\u2019s to ease me through my hell.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 150px\">My father seemed bent on getting a day\u2019s work out of<br \/>\neach of us even if it killed us and the sun didn\u2019t beat him<br \/>\nto the punch. By week\u2019s end it was making good on that<br \/>\npromise as we brushed the pool a second coat of blue.<br \/>\nFlorida Blue, Bay of Naples Sheen, Cote d\u2019Azur, the veriest<br \/>\nblue of blue, that would transform fifteen thousand gallons<br \/>\nof chlorine-threaded water so that 700 day camp kids<br \/>\nmight plash about, squealing in that too too happy summer<br \/>\nsoon to come. Meanwhile there were cabins to Lysol-rinse,<br \/>\ntwo palominos to quarter (illegally) on the abutting<br \/>\nstate preserve, and Rusty the Little Choo-Choo to set<br \/>\nchugging once again along the western chainlink fence<br \/>\npatrolled each dusk by the boss\u2019s German Shepherds.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 150px\">Come September, I would hie me off to the fall-gold hills<br \/>\nof Beacon Prep, where I would rise each morning to chant<br \/>\na version of the Office, then struggle with my fourth-year<br \/>\nLatin, singing of the epic birth of the world that flourished<br \/>\nonce on the Tiber\u2019s sullen banks. But for now that world<br \/>\nbeckoned as oasis only. Here, in this pit of hell ruled silence,<br \/>\npunctuated by the bark of orders from a man who had a pool<br \/>\nto finish, blood-thick paint baking the metal and our hands<br \/>\nunder that Egyptian sun, while darkened each day more<br \/>\nmy princely skin. <em>Sunt lacrimae rerum<\/em>.* Prisons are a state<br \/>\nof mind. Oases ditto. Somewhere, I\u2019d heard, were words<br \/>\nand plashing water. A lake, a rope, a letting go. Somewhere too<br \/>\na plunging downward, then bubbles rising slowly to the top.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 50px\"><span style=\"font-size: smaller\">*<em>There are tears for such things<\/em> (Aeneid weeping as he hears the battles at Troy sung at Carthage in the company of Queen Dido).<\/span><\/p>\n<div style=\"text-indent:225px\"><span style=\"font-size: large\"><\/p>\n<ul style=\"line-height:1;text-indent:-3\"><strong>Piet\u00e0<\/strong><\/span><\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 175px\">New Year&#8217;s Eve, a party at my brother&#8217;s.<br \/>\nHats, favors, the whole shebang, as we waited<br \/>\nfor one world to die into another.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 175px\">And still it took three martinis before<br \/>\nshe could bring herself to say it. How<br \/>\nthe body of her grown son lay alone there<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 175px\">in the ward, just skin &amp; bone, the nurses<br \/>\nmasked &amp; huddled in the doorway, afraid<br \/>\nto cross over into a world no one seemed<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 175px\">to understand. This was a dozen years ago,<br \/>\nyou have to understand, before the thing<br \/>\nher boy had had become a household word.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 175px\">Consider Martha. Consider Lazarus four days gone.<br \/>\nIf only you&#8217;d been here, she says, if only<br \/>\nyou&#8217;d been here. And no one now to comfort her,<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 175px\">no one except this priest, she says, an old<br \/>\nfriend who&#8217;d stood beside them through the dark<br \/>\nnight of it all, a bull-like man, skin black<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 175px\">as the black he wore, the only one who seemed<br \/>\nwilling to walk across death&#8217;s threshold into<br \/>\nthat room. And now, she says, when the death<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 175px\">was over, to see him lift her son, light as a baby<br \/>\nwith the changes death had wrought, and cradle him<br \/>\nlike that, then sing him on his way, a cross<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 175px\">between a lullaby &amp; blues, <em>mmm hmmm<\/em>, while<br \/>\nthe nurses, still not understanding what they saw,<br \/>\nstayed outside and watched them from the door.<\/p>\n<div style=\"text-indent:175px\"><span style=\"font-size: large\"><\/p>\n<ul style=\"line-height:1;text-indent:-3\"><strong>Pantoum for East Fifty-First<\/strong><\/span><\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 175px\">And then, in an instant, it\u2019s gone: the world of East Fifty-First.<br \/>\nGone the round-the-clock clack of the Third Avenue El,<br \/>\nthe clutch-grinding rattle of Fords and the clop clop<br \/>\nof those gray dun drayhorses down on the cobblestone street.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 175px\">Gone now the demon-like sparkles and screams of the El<br \/>\nthat mixed with the curses of streetkids on the sidewalk below.<br \/>\nGone too the hunchbacked ragman on that flint-filthy street,<br \/>\nand old Mr. Quinn muttering curses, sweeping the stoop.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 175px\">Gone the shouts of the gang on that sad sidewalk below,<br \/>\nGerman and Irish, most of them, a wolf pack with little to do<br \/>\nexcept toss insults at Quinn, as he went on sweeping the stoop<br \/>\nor tarring the roof or stoking the coal and banking the furnace.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 175px\">Irish and German, offspring of immigrants, who demanded their due<br \/>\nfrom whomever they could, like my six-year-old self,<br \/>\nas I fled, the one guinea kid on the block, and hid by the furnace,<br \/>\na furnace in embryo myself as they doused me with cold kerosene.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 175px\">Back from the movies under the El, my Brer Rabbit self,<br \/>\nhumming zippety-do-dah while they torched Christmas trees<br \/>\ndumped on the street, then doused me with cold kerosene,<br \/>\nas my mother ran toward me screaming, and they scattered and fled.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 175px\">Cold fear glimpsed by the light of those crackling trees&#8230;<br \/>\nAnd the synagogue cantor handing out seedcakes and bread,<br \/>\nthen Harry hurtling the bread back at the old man as we fled.<br \/>\nThe pity and fear of it, oh, and the gift of that bread.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 175px\">And the go-cart Quinn built me and Harry broke, and the bread.<br \/>\nAnd the gang on the tar-blackened roof back those seventy years,<br \/>\nunfurling the flag with the swastika on it. Oh, and the gift of the bread.<br \/>\nAnd me in my First Communion tie and knickers that May.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 175px\">And Harry teaching us love words back those seventy years,<br \/>\nwhen he ordered Bobby and me to jiggle up down, up down.<br \/>\nAnd me on my roof in those spiffy black knickers that May,<br \/>\nand my father slamming Harry\u2019s brother in his wife beater\u2019s shirt<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 175px\">when he\u2019d had it with Harry and the brother went down.<br \/>\nAll gone now, along with the faint cries of the Third Avenue El,<br \/>\nand the sullen Fords and the blood-smeared wife beater\u2019s shirt,<br \/>\nand the dray horses fading west down East Fifty-First.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Beloved Ghosts of Compiano Italy, sweet Italy, and the ghosts the very thought of it evokes. They came from Compiano, in the region of Parma, my grandfather and my grandmother, nonno e nonna, back some 120 years ago. First Giuseppe\u2014Joe\u2014age 25, in 1896, then Giulia, with their one-year-old son, Primo, the following year. They &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"read-more\"><a class=\"readmore-btn\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/italianamericana\/?p=650\">+<span class=\"screen-reader-text\">  Read More<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-650","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-featured-poets"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/italianamericana\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/650","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/italianamericana\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/italianamericana\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/italianamericana\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/italianamericana\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=650"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/italianamericana\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/650\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/italianamericana\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=650"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/italianamericana\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=650"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/italianamericana\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=650"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}