Under Statement

[Knot]

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Hi Beowulf.

I wrote it while I was on a journey to Italy to discover my roots. Something in this might make for a better title than the present one. And a few more geographic particulars wouldn't hurt.

The episode in the 2nd strophe takes place at a bus station in Calabria which happened to be propitiously situated next to some cactus pears. This was not clear to me (slow on the uptake, perhaps), a problem compounded by the phrase 'my home town'.

Even a simple fix like

In the coolness of first light

I am impressed by the bus driver

who takes time at the side

of the road to location in Italy

to pick cactus pears.

might help matters. Similarly

Working around the needles,

like so many discarded syringes

on a coastal Californian? beach

a few miles from my home town.

Cactus pears are considered a delicacy in Italy and negotiating the needles is a difficult enough task with rubber gloves, but to do so bare-handed is quite the task. The discarded syringes refer to the fruit's barbs. I understood the image, it just seemed a particularly ugly one that had no relation to anything else in the poem. Are the plants actually reminiscent of a needle littered beach?

Given he's a bus driver, and Calabria has mountain roads might he not

Working around the needles,

taking each as carefully

as any vertiginous bend

in the Aspromonte ...

Yes, somehow connecting these three strophes seamlessly has me quite stumped at the moment .

Write a fourth

Might be worth considering beginning with the ending, your father's death, and going from there, if indeed the search for roots followed after that incident. It still doesn't solve the problem of needing an ending but ... Just a quick cut 'n paste.

Our town, my father told me

was once alive - before

his migration toward the American

dream propelled him forward,

inevitably leading him

before that car

that made the legal u-turn

which took his life.

"Calabrians understand heat"

my father would say –

"the unhinged passion of the sun."

It is the source of a pristine morning

in the peach groves where

asps give birth to their young,

dropping them from the trees.

The contadini pick fruit

at their own Cleopatran risk.

In the coolness of first light

I am impressed by the bus driver

who takes time at the side

of the road to pick cactus pears.

Working around the needles,

like so many discarded syringes

on a coastal beach miles away

from my home town:

an abandoned source of chestnuts,

spring water and venom.

Best, Knot

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