Catania

We lived in a stone farmhouse at the edge of town.

I’d been assigned to process asylum claims

and you’d come to write about the abandoned homes

in the island’s interior the government was selling cheap.

A family of barn swallows lived inside our chimney.

In the mornings, I drove to the intake centre through fields

of hay, alfalfa. A crop of sunflowers spanned the tract

along the creek. Most of the men I interviewed were farmers

back home. They’d left because of drought, sometimes flood or blight.

Afternoons, the sunflowers bowed in their furrows and the clouds

turned alabaster. At home, I’d find you lying on the hearth

listening to the swallows. We were good to each other,

so new in our love, with shape to our days.

The fighting spread and more ships came ashore.

Women and children were held in a new location.

Impractically, I studied Sicilian, not because my grandfather

spoke it, because I wanted to unlearn time.

I could have looked up the word for sunflower.

I could’ve asked. But it was the not knowing I savored

on the slow drives through the fields, the pheasants

disappearing into the thick brush along the road.

The possibility of a word that could redeem us.

I lay beside you on the cool stone beside the chimney.

The swallows were out hunting, or looking for hair, grass.

Most of the rich who’d bought the empty houses

couldn’t fix them up, you told me, supplies were scarce,

labor hard to find. Night wind carried the smell of the fields

through the screenless windows. A flock of egrets

followed the baler, gorging on the insects and frogs

the blades exposed and left without shelter.