La freccia e il cerchio
anno 5, numero 5, 2014
pp. 245-246

10.
Mary di Michele
Dreaming of other absences

Bicycle Thieves

If I could go back to my birthplace, Lanciano,
wander all day up and down the corso,
stop by the cathedral built on the ruins
of a Roman prison, and pray
                                              if I could

make my way at night by the glimmering
of my brief candle, and if I could see
into the darkness I would see my father,
if he were still living
                                  there in Lanciano.

Strangely it seems it was just yesterday
that I returned from Lanciano feeling
despondent because if I were pure
spirit I could have gone back
                                               in time

(traversed the years along with the miles),
and so have seen my father before
the world war, seen the boy my father was
before his father betrayed his
                                               bare-foot youngest son

and sold his bicycle. If you call him by his true
name, Vincenzo, not Vincent, will he recall
his life in Italian, his hopes undimmed,
                                                               his eyes still clear.

If I were sharper, or indeed purer
I might yet see that boy in the old man
in stocking feet at the nursing home
in Toronto, my father who
                                           no longer knows

his life or his daughter in any language.
When at last he rises from his wheelchair,
when he leaves this earth to return to
earth, he too will go back
                                         to Lanciano,

to the cathedral on the corso,
where he will find his bicycle among
the stolen years of his life, and ride it
not towards the future, but into
                                                  the past.
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