 His huge mother sweats, turns to count my change, slowly, slowly, breathing hard as she rolls her chair to the register behind the scratched glass counter. The smell of burning sugar vents from ovens in back, over me, out to the street where they are hanging lights for the festival. Out the window, in the middle of my life, in Brooklyn, in autumn, in the afternoon of the century, some poor soul has scribbled thick, black magicmarkings: „SICK OF IT ALL.‰ Sick, really? of everything? Of ossi di morti, these yearly bones of the sacred dead turned to sweet meringues you can pop in your mouth? Sick of Ettore, the baker's son, just today sixteen in baseball cap and baggy shorts, blond feather on his lip, brick of Tuscan gold from tip to toe? who assembles my box from nothing, knots the string and clips it with hands of such deft and clever caramel? who once washed his car in the street, shirtless chest bright as the resurrection of our Lord? the little sweets in his hands shake the thrones of the saints, they enlarge my heart-- this sickness is my master, I groan on his bed, I swell and fall, I never rise |
|