Every road I travelled led back to you.
They fell in love with Venice, it called them
back and back. After jobs and family they
would retire there, visit all they’d set aside—
make music with friends, new galleries,
concerts, museums, ancient sights—so
bought a small flat, a place land. Together
they visited only once, for my father to say
goodbye to friends before he died.
She returned twice a year alone, was it to keep
their dream alive? Coming back she’d stay
a night with me, travel-worn but full. Happy
I’d say as emotions rarely leapt from her.
She’d fill the evening with highlights—
a lecture on Tolstoy or the Tirol, dinners
with friends, tea with Ezra Pound’s daughter.
My mother, a widow on her own, following
her gifts, keeping her dreams alive.
One morning she came downstairs, book
clasped in her hand, a finger holding a page
crying deeply, blurted out the story of two
parted lovers who agreed to meet years later
by the River Piedra, she on one side weeping,
he, a ghost, on the other. I held my mother
as she blurted, I haven’t fully grieved, and
unleashed a river of tears for my father,
as if yesterday, as if ten years before she
hadn’t sobbed till she couldn’t.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 25, Issue 2.
Connemara Wadsworth’s chapbook, The Possibility of Scorpions won the White Eagle Coffee Store Press 2009 Chapbook Contest. She’s been published in Prairie Schooner, Bellevue Literary Review, Valparaiso, and elsewhere. “Mediation on a Photo” was a winner of The Griffin Museum’s Once Upon a Time: Photos That Inspire Tall Tales.See all items about Connemara Wadsworth
