Searching for Entrance

Searching for Entrance


She steps into a postcard
where poetry is a boat with a white bonnet
rocking on a blue lap. Above Lago di Como,
Brunate rims the crescent, an artist's garret


for the jaded elite escaping the heat
or their husbands. Light falls in triangles
of honey-soaked parchment,
a place where no one sleeps yet everyone dreams.


The funiculare hauls her on a silver leash
up the roller coaster hill to the old Hotel Milano.
She tries to hold onto something
but the slant of the walls drags her back.


Restless, she wanders the streets,
cobbled canting capricious.
Every doorway filled with women in black,
furrowed faces hunting sun.


The handsome grocer
fails to rouse her with his amorous
still life: pyramids of polished pomegranates,
brown eggs in burlap bags, leeks cocked on a bed


of crushed ice, artichokes concealing
delicata under soft bristles.
Her life is already severed, burnished,
waiting to be consumed.


The maid drapes a clean white tablecloth
over her door lintel, every day folded
with a different design, a message for women
in frames -- look each day from a new angle.


Climbing above the mansions, she stumbles
upon a bed of bearded blue iris
below three stone steps leading to
what?


Each golden tongue for a day
shriveling to a question mark.
Tuberous toes dancing up the hill
long after the house has fallen.