—Ischia
The little boy with the plastic bucket of sea glass
shows us his jewelry, for sale, trying to impress
my girls who must be marvelous to him.
He cannot fathom the stained glass of their eyes,
one girl Mediterranean blue and one a simple hazel
of the island colors here, a hillside mix
of stone pine green and brown volcanic soil.
The little showoff might be five, eyes alive to
the occasional color in the silky, lapping water
in front of Gino’s deck where we just ate the best
bruschetta in the world. He rattles his little bucket,
trying to get their attention, while my girls,
delirious from having traveled by taxi, train,
and taxi, and ferry, and taxi again on this island,
my girls, one teen and one pre-teen, still playful
girls, roll in the sandy shallows of this beach,
lapping up the lapping. Yachts ignore them, and they
ignore the yachts, while the bells from the church
strike the metal call of two o’clock. The boy rattles
his bucket again, and then walks off with his treasure,
satisfied. And I am satisfied at being in Ischia again,
my wife here floating on her back in the supreme
saltwater. Because it is clear this afternoon,
beyond her I can see Gaeta, the white walls rising
from the shore of that far city, and to the west
a mountain looms where once, we suppose, Odysseus
lounged in excess but finally tired and longed
for home. There was no such thing as sea glass then,
though the mermaids splashed along the shorelines
farther north, sirens who sang a song of colored light,
and he would often grow nostalgic for that time
when safely tied to a mast, he had heard the kaleidoscope
of poetry and swooned like a boy, enamored
of the sharpest colors of the sea while the bones
of human failure tumbled in the shallows.
John Poch's fifth book of poems is Texases (WordFarm 2019). He teaches at Texas Tech University.
Twitter: @jpoch Instagram: @pochphoto
Photo by DurhamDundee on Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND