Pentecost

Inside the cage, a cardtable with

a broken leg, an ancient Olivetti

and the bars etching stripes-

diagonal across the face of the man

who crouches there, a shell case

for a stool, talking to himself

in an English of his own design.

Writing in a spiral notebook, the kind

a child would take to school,

he tugs his beard's gray stubble.

This is Pisa, Nineteen Forty-five.

Beyond the prison compound's barbed

wire mesh, twenty yards away, my father

in his corporal's stripes sips sick-

sweet grappa at a cafe with the men

of his platoon, the latticework canopy

intricately shadowing his face

as if he wore a beekeeper's veil.

He must wait ten days until a DC-3

can ferry him to the Azores;

then, a troop ship to Havana.

But until then he must help to guard

a compound for Italian prisoners

and spies, pacing the rows of tents

and cages every night from eight

until two. Some nights he smuggles

cigarettes and chocolates to the old man

who claims that he's American himself,

who speaks in whispers from within

the bars, in the corny mannered slang

of a movie cowboy. The old man

doesn't sleep, and sometimes all night

mumbles to himself as he rocks

on his cot, a blanket draped around

his shoulders. Another glass of grappa

and the afternoon appears to lift

its veil, awash in the white

piazza light. My father's friends

have left the table, and he takes out

pencil and paper to write down

the details of this light, its shimmer

on the whitewashed houses-a brilliance,

he thinks, in which the dead arise

to be born anew, and infinitely brighter

than the light he woke to

each morning through his bandages

that long month in Palermo, the Irish

nurse's cool hand on his shoulder.

He'll stare like this all afternoon.

And who could he write this to?

What is it he could say? He drops

his lire on the checkered tablecloth,

drains the glass, and blames

the trance of grappa for

the oddness of his thoughts-

how he felt, for a moment,

he'd had the power to speak in Greek,

Italian and Chinese, his thoughts

churning forth in swirling cadences,

like oars striking brightly

against a sea so vivid

he's blinded, and must turn away.