Journal of Italian Translation - Brooklyn College - Academic Home ...

where you rest at last,
for all the sea taught
you and you taught me:
that the waves go out
and nothing comes back.
Journal of Italian Translation
On Me!
In the next room his brothers are asleep,
the two still in school. They just can’t wait
to grow up and be men, to make money.
Last night at dinner they sat across from him,
their brother, a man, but a man with nothing,
without money or the prospect of money.
He never pays, never tosses a bill
down on the bar so he can say, “On me!”
At four in the morning when he can’t sleep,
he rehearses the stale phrase to himself
with a delicate motion of the wrist
that lets the bill float down. He can’t pace
for fear of waking his mom, who sleeps
alone downstairs in the old storage room
off the kitchen. When he was a kid, twelve
or fourteen, like his brothers, he never knew
why boys no older than he did the things
they did, the robberies, gang fights, ODs,
rapes, he never understood his father’s
wordless rages that would explode in punches
and kicks, bottles, plates, glasses hurled
across the kitchen. The next morning would be
so quiet that from his room upstairs
he’d hear the broomstraws scratching the floor
as his mother swept up the debris, and hear
her humming to herself. Now it’s so clear,
so obvious, he wonders why it took
so long for him to get it and to come of age.
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