Douglas Nicholas​
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​