Must we choose?

-

April wind sounds like a jet plane outside the window,
so near I can feel the hum on the pane.
I am happy to sit under an afghan
on my heavy gold chair
Sunday afternoon
like an old woman awaiting visitors.

A ladybug alights on my lap, tucks in her wings,
and we are quiet together.

On my tongue are memories of lunch.

What else should occupy
our time on a Sunday afternoon
but the memory of food, and succumbing to sleep
as it drones us under its cloud?
I feel myself traveling through the sky
to a snack bar in Florence.

I have decided not to choose favorites, I say to the ladybug.

What would lime be without avocado? Onion without fried potatoes? Can you imagine basil without tomatoes, or cheese without vino rosso? How pointless to think of pesto without crostini— just Vaudevillian plaid pants dancing from a spoon onto the stage of your tongue, no toast, dry and white, to spread it upon. You open the cupboard for crostini again and again, only to remember with disappointment, Oh yes, pesto was our favorite food, we thought we had to compare and choose, forgetting
that pesto is nothing without the vessel of toast to carry it
farther into our being.

The ladybug is fast asleep,
the roar of wind is gone, blowing somewhere
over the Atlantic on its way to Florence,
the favorite city of someone,
and my memories from there join me as visitors.

Florence —

a physical place apart, a presence in the heart,
never lost,
a stone bridge, a painting, a dome, a statue,
a young groom and his bride carrying calla lilies through a square
toward their new life, that
in their existence alone, rebirth me

— What would Florence be
without this ponte of a stone white sky between us,
an ordinary white wafer carrying the salty tears
from Michelangelo’s pietà, never lost, to my tongue
on a Palm Sunday afternoon?
What would my window be without the sky,
the bridge to everything.

-