THE
On the island in the
middle sea
thirteen goats are still taken out
to graze on
sweating in the south wind, inhaling
fumes emitted by heavy vehicles
burning hot tarmac.
Thirteen tainted goats
ruminate paper and plastic and dust.
Then there’s the prime
goat.
It’s always the same
goat I see from my auto
when the traffic slows down uphill:
a scruffy goat
this is
with an
ancient gaze, mixing
pain and
apprehension,
apathy and
banality,
resignation
and memories,
patience and pietism,
as it looks on
from behind crash barriers
on
An obsessive look this
goat has,
melancholic, distant yet actual
like my
mother’s stare at her miscarriage and later
the death of
her child of dysentery like my grandmother’s the gaze of the goat
grandma Lena
cab painter’s daughter & wife of Giovanni exiled to fascist
it’s my mother
my grandma my greatgrandmother that goat
it’s Rosaria lurking away from His Majesty’s sailormen and
the French officer
who lusted
after her it is Sulpitia the courtesan with goat eyes
mixing potions
for delicious love turned sour and cruel
full of
promise but yielding only sorrow
Violetta is the goat Annuzza the
flower maiden or Fatuma
avoiding the
feudal Lord’s militia
or Magdala doing the laces of her frock to cover her moistened
breasts
after Don Jose’d’Alfonso ravished her at the Bishop’s villa more
ancient
is the goat’s
gaze than the spiral wells in the time of Marozza and
the monks
and more
intense than the eyes of Ashtoreth the goddess
or those of
the peasant daughter of Sadik tal-Kabiri
and deeper
than the shade of the giant boulders
where Fat
Mother dwelled.
From all those women
derives inheritance the goat on
grazing on dust and plastic bags and on our hopes,
we, lost souls on the fast traffic lanes
who sustain a flicker of vision,
and a little faith in the woman of mercy.