Poems in Narrative & Ballads

On the via where the laundry breathes between walls,
she stacked the morning figs in a crate of straw,
purple and split at the seam, still warm from the tree.
Her hands were stained like old church glass.
I bought three for a coin, and she gave me five,
and told me not to bruise them on the walk home.

Her father called from the doorway, half asleep,
a name that sounded like water over stones.
She answered in the dialect of this street,
the one my mother forbade me to speak at school.
For a moment the piazza was a room,
and the room was a country, and the country was hers.

By August the crate stood empty by the wall.
The shutters closed. The laundry kept its slow
argument with the wind. I asked the baker's boy
and he shrugged, and sold me bread, and said the north,
always the north, some factory, some cousin's floor.
The figs went on splitting in other courtyards.

Now when the evening shadows climb the stone
I walk the long way past her door and think
of five figs in a paper twist, and how
she weighed them in her palm before she let them go,
as if to teach me the honest price of things,
as if she knew I would still be counting.

The ferryman's hands are a map of the tide,
all salt-cracked and knuckled and slow,
and he counts out the coins with a click on the rail—
cold copper, the last of my fare, and I know
that the engine will cough like a man out of breath
as we push from the pier in the dark,
with the gull-light gone and the harbor lamp low
and the water as black as a dog's bark.

There was Brigid who swore she would follow me down,
but she stood on the steps with her shawl
pulled tight to her chin, and she said not a word,
and I heard the wind take the farewell from us all.
She had flour on her sleeve from the morning bread,
and I mind how she brushed it away,
as if what we'd been could be dusted right off
and swept out with the crumbs of the day.

The tide takes the harbor the way it takes all—
the rope and the rust and the name
that a boy carved deep in the boathouse door
when the summer still tasted of rain.
And the ferryman hums an old smuggling tune
that his father hummed after the war,
and the stars come out one by one overhead
like coins on a dresser drawer.

So it's over the water and into the fog,
and it's never look back at the light,
for the girl on the steps has her own road to walk
and I've mine, and the both of us right.
And the engine will cough, and the ferryman'll swear,
and the salt will come up on my lip,
and I'll carry Dunmore in the crook of my arm
like a stone that I can't let slip.