Primavera on Mulberry Street

PRIMAVERA ON MULBERRY STREET

By A. S. Maulucci

 

 

The old ones, i vecchi

sit in the Mulberry Street cafe in Manhattan

sipping red wine from Tuscano

and dunking their biscotti from the bakery around the corner

talking of their giovinezza, their days of gold and honey

reminiscing about that distant land

remembering with reverence

a street corner

            a field of olive trees   

                        a snow-covered mountain

                                    a wall covered with lilac

                        a stretch of pebbled shore

            a public square

as a tenderness comes and goes in their eyes

and their voices grow brittle

while their memories melt away

like the candles on the tables.

 

The young ones, i giovani

            glide by with a natural grace

a new rhythm in their swaying hips

            an ancient swagger in their stride

talking of their rough pleasures

            with a tigerish gleam in their every glance.

 

Furtively, with a mixture of love and hate

the old ones watch them pass in silence,

their faces go dead for a moment

then flicker back to life.

Someone says,

“Youth is a country you can only visit once” in Calabrian

and someone else says,

“Let’s drink to that” in American

and someone else says,

“Cent’an!” in earnest,

meaning may you live a hundred years of life,

and they all raise their glasses and drink

the old red wine made with grapes from their native land

with a stubborn joy piercing through their hearts.

Italian Words

ITALIAN WORDS, a sestina

by A. S. Maulucci

 

My grandparents’ home was filled with the music of Italian words,

syllables that sounded like the cantata of love,

and when I heard them as a boy I felt a hunger,

a stirring in my divided soul for something whole,

something I could not get in this land of plenty -- my heritage,

rooted in Europe where I intuited the circle would close.

 

My parents, born in America, wanted to close

the book on Italy. English not Italian words

were used with the children, whose heritage

should be American. They did this out of love.

We had a pretty good life on the whole.

My Depression-raised parents would allow no hunger

 

to stalk our home. But another persistent hunger

awoke in my heart, and growing up I learned to close

the wound with games, books, movies; then the whole

cultural revolution of the sixties gave me the words

I needed to express the changes taking place in me. Love

was everywhere, and with college came a new heritage

 

of an intellectual kind, but this was not the only heritage

I was seeking. I woke up feeling a restlessness, a hunger

for travel. The chanting in the streets proclaimed, “Make love

not war,” and on the evening news death was too close

for comfort. I longed to hear those Italian words

again, so I flew to Rome and traveled the whole

 

peninsula for a summer hoping to be made whole.

With ears open and senses alive I drank in my heritage,

yet amidst the paint and marble, I could never get enough words,

always more words, pouring into me. Then a different hunger

struck me at a hotel in Rome. As the circle was about to close

it broke open suddenly at a point where the love

 

was weakest. It threw me into a tailspin, this need for love,

this yearning for family, without whom I’d never be whole.

So in mid-August, I came back to be close

to the ones who are a part of my heritage.

Now the years have passed, I’ve married, but still a hunger

possesses me at times, one that cannot be told in words.

 

My family and I are close, we share a heritage,

there is love and something close to being whole

but the old hunger persists when I hear the music of Italian words.

In My Father's Kitchen

IN MY  FATHER’S KITCHEN

By A. S. Maulucci

 

My father’s kitchen, sacred as any temple,

was a place where the gas burners

flamed with a Promethean fire.

Never had a high priest

presided over a sacrifice

with greater reverence than my father,

wrapped in his blood-spattered vestment,

prepared the feast for our Sunday dinner.

My mother was his handmaid

and I, on occasion, his humble acolyte.

 

Earthen bowls, wooden spoons,

pestles and mortars, graters, skewers,

grinding machines operated with a crank

were the simple artifacts of his order,

a fraternity founded on the principles

that no effort would be spared,

no ingredient that wasn’t fresh from the soil

would be granted admission here.

 

Mostly, I stood by and watched.

In my father’s fleshly hands

the razored blade gutted fish and fowl

with a diviner’s ancient skill.

The slimy entrails spilling onto newsprint

held no headlines of the future,

but nothing was discarded

that would enrich tomorrow’s meal.

Whole birds lost their heads and legs,

flesh was removed from clinging tendons

and stubborn bone with artful ease.

 

Seasonings sanctified by age,

smoke from frying pan and oven

spread their incense in every room.

The fragrance of my father’s kitchen

was a thing of wonder from house to house.

 

In my father’s kitchen

food was god’s body.

The love he dared not speak

flowed freely from his fingers

into sultry sauces, dancing pastas, singing loaves.

 

Wrapped around his purpose

like vines around a tree,

my father’s hands and eyes were quick and sure.

I marveled at his sudden splendor:

here the man who plodded through life

with a bloodless determination

strode upon the field with a glory all his own.

Home-Made Wine

HOME-MADE WINE

 

 

The grapes arrived from Italy

in crates made of splintered spruce.

They nestled together like immigrants in steerage.

Stacked and semi-conscious in the dank recesses

of my grandfather’s cellar,

they awaited the sunlight,

not dead but dormant.

 

And when their time came,

the crates were carried into the garden

where we stood waiting in an eager circle.

Emptied into tubs, they tumbled out

in a cascade of liberated souls.

 

I heard them laughing in delight

as they struck against the metal

and lay inertly glistening in the sun,

happy to shed their skins

in sacrifice for the family wine.

 

We crushed them with cruel but loving hands,

We smashed them with savage but loving feet,

And their blood flowed darkly in the blazing sun.

Etruscan Paintings by A. S. Maulucci

ETRUSCAN PAINTINGS

 

 

 

On the wall

of the Etruscan tomb

a kingly figure at a feast

holds up an egg

while his wife

dressed in dazzling raiment

cradles a tiny ark.

Behind them looms a black lion

striking at a deer.

 

A small boy

from the nearby town of Cerveteri

holds up a flashlight,

stands watching them

as if they were alive.

The meaning of these pictures

flows deep into his subconscious mind,

yet his face remains a smooth plaster wall

where innocence will give way

to the frescoes of his days.

Baking Bread by A. S. Maulucci

BAKING BREAD

 

 

The smell of baking bread is my madeleine.

Memories come swirling back . . .

Of warm kitchens with oblong tables of wood

or formica made to look like wood.

Flushed, smiling faces,

white aprons like stained surplices,

arms covered with white flour, the fairy dust of magic lands,

women’s arms pounding in rhythm,

fists punching the dough.

The good pang of hunger, the salivating,

the rumble of a strong appetite

needed to feed growing limbs.

The warmth of the oven,

the pulsing heart of it all . . .

 

O the oven!

The fiery belly of metal with a door like a dragon’s mouth,

the belly that gave birth to the hot brown loaves

springing from the miniature inferno,

looking like the flesh of innocent babes,

tasting of earth and spirit.

 

In the communal kitchen,

in the communion of the bread,

bread that fed my youthful spirit, thick and crusty,

unlike the thin wafers of the churchly sacrament

that stuck to the roof of mouth and dried it so

that I craved a sip of wine.

 

Bread and wine were the natural elements

of my coming of age, of my coming into life.

I knew I was alive when I bit into a thick, crusty slice of freshly baked bread

and took a mouthful of my grandfather’s wine,

made from the grapes of Italy.

 

What is the alchemy that turns bread to spirit?

That transforms bread into love?

Or is it by love that the bread becomes spirit?

An American Journey by A. S. Maulucci

 

AN AMERICAN JOURNEY

 

 

My grandfather Antonio

left Apulia, Italy

for New York in 1923

pursuing not his dreams

but the man who murdered his deaf-mute father,

promising his mother he would avenge

her husband’s death

and return with honor,

his vendetta fulfilled.

 

 

When the blood is roused

such vows are quickly made,

but when the head cools

they are abruptly broken

especially in Manhattan where a man

who does not want to be found

can hide like a leaf in summer.

 

 

Antonio found a room on the Lower East Side,

went to work selling perfumes door-to-door,

the wrong sort of job if you’re sniffing out

the man who murdered your father,

but perfect for meeting a woman.

She was a beauty

from a small village near his own,

a woman such as the one in Fellini’s Amarcord

who walks the earth like a goddess.

 

 

From then on, my grandfather’s wife

occupied the foreground of his life.

He worked hard to make her rich.

Prosperity came to them,

the next generation was born,

and the old world withered like a dying olive tree.

But not for good.

 

 

 

Decades later, weakened by cancer,

my grandfather was sitting on a park bench

in Hartford, Connecticut when a man

in a wheelchair stopped under a nearby tree.

With him were two male attendants.

Antonio watched them warily

until he was sure it was the man

who murdered his father, stricken now

with paralysis. The two men with him

both deaf-mutes, appeared to be his sons,

and they were having an argument in sign language.

 

 

Asking his parents for forgiveness,

Antonio walked quietly away

His American journey

was finally over,

but it was much too late

to go home.