What We Throw Away
A long time ago, such a long time ago,
in Greece, certainly it was Greece,
we had no place to sleep,
our friends’ boat was late to dock
so we spent the night sweating on a bed
in a blue room above a bar—hot, oh God,
the air was hot and loud, and we were
too sweaty to want sex, but we did it
anyway, we were that young, and we
slipped on each other’s limbs, that’s how
sweaty wet we were, but we laughed
and licked the sheen from each other’s
necks and knew the planet was much
too hot if this is what summer was like
at night in an island village of stucco
painted white to deflect the sun by day,
aligned to catch the water breeze by night
and the cool hill clouds, but we forgot our
revelation and got up the next morning
and found our friends and sailed around
the point to dive for amphorae, planted
for the tourists, maybe, or I’d rather think
dumped as trash two thousand years
ago, such benign trash, terra cotta with
tiny fish flickering in and out in schools,
and I don’t believe we thought about
trash as it soon would be, plastic and
ubiquitous, and ruinous, but of course
we kept our own rubbish on board, of
course we did, and we dove and stayed
cool and loved each other, and it was
all such a long time ago.
Alice Campbell Romano‘s first book, a chapbook, was awarded one of The Comstock Review‘s three rare honorable mentions last year, and then won C&R Press‘s Summer Tide Pool Contest — C&R will publish THE CONSOLATION OF GEOMETRY in September. Alice lived 13 years in Rome, Italy, turning Italian sceneggiature into American movie scripts. She married a dashing Italian; they raised their family in Rome and in Los Angeles. Alice is a published and anthologized poet who wishes she’d devoted her writing time to poetry earlier: she says that to write poetry helps her cope with the poet’s inevitable “guilt and regret,” (see Ellen Bass), at least while Alice writes.
The Marbled Sigh 