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John Adinolfi

Look here in my palm; this tiny photograph

is four-tenths of what I know about him:

here in this coin-sized oval can be seen

the arrogant nostrils, the delicate bones,

the somber gaze

he gave to my wife

 

There exists also a formal wedding portrait:

beside the bride with her full lips,

her sweet frightened eyes,

her heavy curls escaping from beneath the white lace wimple,

he stands with the poised and gloomy severity

of a bank examiner or an experienced assassin,

handsome and swarthy and potent;

already in their features

my darling can be discerned

 

She hardly knows more than I, herself

being just eight the day he died so young,

but when I ask she bursts out:

Oh he was a hard man, he was

a typical Italian papa; how stern he was

with us, how strict he was

with my sister

 

She shows me a third picture,

in which she is bracketed by her parents;

they face the camera soberly,

armored in the thick overcoats

of the late Forties. Here, I say,

see how you lean on him here, how

you are leaning into him

 

A night and then another go by; she recalls

these strange and poignant scenes

where a little girl and a man

watch as companions the brutal Friday evening fights,

or follow the broadcast ballgames

on the massive wooden radio

 

I had forgotten those good things about him,

she says, those good hours

before the illness bit

 

Look into my palm while you listen to my voice:

Somewhere, always receding, there is a room,

you are all mindful of some room like this,

it is a magic room, the door to it opens only in dream;

there is a table, there is yellow lamplight,

there is a carpenter who sits at the table

and he works on a miniature clock;

he is being watched

by a dark skinny girl

 

John Adinolfi's gone;

he has left us a drawer

filled with small tools and mystery,

but by my fifty years, by this gray-shot beard,

I am here obliged

to remember him to you

 

John Adinolfi's gone;

he is up the line and the telegraph is down,

but by the love I bear my wife

I am now constrained

to commend him to you

 

John Adinolfi's gone;

he declares himself to us only

by those few traces that are all

that fathers leave:

a snapshot, a carved toy clock,

her hooded, her saturnine,

her mesmerist's eyes

 

 

​from EMILY BESTLER BOOKS, an imprint of ATRIA BOOKS, a division of SIMON AND SCHUSTER​

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