Poetry
Introduction from Obbligato
A poem a day. What a good practice. Why not a painting a day? Their mutual passion for all the arts and the revels of the week converged. Alberto and Edward decided to engage writing and painting in a unique way. The plan: Edward would write a poem every morning and immediately send it off to Alberto, who would rush to the easel. The painting was never to be illustrative but a spontaneous reciprocation, or a call and response. The collaboration proved to be joyous and challenging, pushing them both to a level of intense work. Their oeuvre now exceeds one hundred. Obbligato presents twenty-six (an abecedarius) paired works intricately involving art, etymology, philosophy, and sopra tutto, a delirious love of language. The intense watercolors seem barely able to contain the energy compressed in their 5” x 5” size.
The three of us live part of the year in the sublime landscape of Tuscany, on the same hillside overlooking the valley where Hannibal defeated the Romans in 217 B.C. Both of our houses border an Etruscan wall and a Medici fortress. It’s an ancient and painterly landscape. Breathing the air is enough to inspire anyone. But there’s more—all the hill towns with their secret treasures, heritage of art, and great sense of community. Obbligato is at play at the intersection of these gifts.
Reader: gaze, read, and then start over.
-Frances Mayes, Editor
Dreamed that Jesus
If I Had Dreamed that Jesus Walked from Nazareth
If I had dreamed that Jesus walked from Nazareth
To Rome, I had forgotten all about it upon waking,
The cardinals outside my window in their first appearance
This year, glorious in gaudy red, making their joyful
Noise to no one they know, joy spreading over the gessoed grass,
And I remembered spending late mornings before
Lunch playing buck euchre and trumping and tricking,
And the jokers on the floor, the crazy ones,
The fools, and if a jongleur could still be
Found roaming and singing, or like the Sardinian
Shepherds with their sheepskin bagpipes and jangling
Cups at Christmastime in Cortona, and the Cardinali,
Five pigeons on a spit, the falcon in the backyard cage,
The merlo who lived for twenty years, and it,
Circling and circling for what had been in the nest
And was now gone, the snow melting circa 1951,
Year of birth, year the moment became more than
Something that just simply passes us all by,
By way of light, filtered through dreams, light Velázquez
Used in the Old Woman Cooking Eggs, 1618, the knife’s shadow
Curving on the white porcelain plate, and then I pass by
A fountain spraying light that’s called water, or the flashlight
That Placido uses in the darkened dining room, full of guests,
Those of us who have made the journey, walked all the daylight
Hours and brought jonquils, or those who have been jettisoned, or
Those who have found the road too long to bring them all the way.
Do All the Houses
Do All the Houses in Hell Come Fully Furnished
Do all the houses in hell come fully furnished
Or must I bring my bedroll, moka pot,
Hedge clippers, and baby aspirin, although let’s
Face it: these are not worries that ward off
The dawn, someone once again clicking on the kitchen
Lights, the day once again crowned with laurel,
Placido’s rooster up, everyone’s head eventually
Untucked, ducking under the lintel of day,
The unraveling of the last dream, was that
Me, sitting on that bench, whipping the egg
Whites for the brutti ma buoni, thinking Easter’s
So late this year, and by then all the cars
Will have forgotten the snowdrifts, the exhaust
Of the late twentieth century that still hangs for
Those who can still see it, and us, soon somersaulting
Into humidity and what could always be horror,
The kind we learned to put up with, whether
Mildly apocalyptic, the H-bomb at the hobby shows,
Or what life we had before this one, whether
The curtain call was out of kindness or whether
What air we walk through changes us forever,
The forever in forever after, the after which,
The intimacy of looking through the reflection,
The odd bit of something found once in an alley,
Saved in a jar, and rediscovered one day on our way
Out, something to hold onto, prop on a shelf, call home.