Author’s Note: Dusk is my favorite time of day. While I don’t have a direct view of the sunset from my house, I can often see swathes of various colors streaking the sky and a commotion of clouds. I find the quieting of the world leads to quieting of the spirit. The intersection with night usually comes in a slow sweep and when the clouds allow, begins to speckle the sky with stars.

Now Dimming

lucky the leftover
light
of a long day now
dimming in small
chapters as shadows inch
and colors emerge
more frantic
than mere description
such as gold, violet,
tangerine
the hour that empties
to evening, a caress,
a settling of the
soul
before the first star
beckons to the rest
and night falls
like the sweep
of a great cloak 

⧫

Mercedes Lawry is the author of three chapbooks and the collection Vestiges from Kelsay Books. Her poetry has appeared in Nimrod, Another Chicago Magazine, Alaska Quarterly Review, and other literary journals. She’s been nominated several times for a Pushcart Prize. Her poetry collection, Small Measures, was recently published by ELJ Editions. She frequently publishes short fiction, as well, and was a semi-finalist in The Best Small Fictions 2016. She lives in Seattle, Washington.

The Delmarva Review, in St. Michaels, MD, gives selected writers a desirable home in print (with a digital edition) for their most compelling new prose and poetry to present to  discerning audiences everywhere. It exists at a time when many commercial print publications (and literary magazines) are closing their doors or reducing literary content. For each annual edition, the editors have read thousands of submissions (at no charge) to select the best of new poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. About half are from the Delmarva and Chesapeake region. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org

Author’s note: “It’s a weary psychological truth that one is often one’s own worst enemy. It is also true, to paraphrase Proust, that the only veritable voyage is that which is undertaken within the Self, though in a foreign land, absent the habitual repères, these aforementioned truths may impose themselves upon the consciousness with an unfamiliar intensity. Here, then, is the story of a man who, in an elsewhere in which he believed to find the comfort of escape, instead stumbled upon the imperishable intensity of loss.”

Un Bouquet de Debra

DURING HIS YEARS OF DECLINE, in which the last of the youthful fires were quenched in dissipation, he rented a room under the mansard of a Haussmann-style apartment building. Furnished with a shabby sofa bed, a porcelain washbasin, an electric hot plate with a single heating element, a folding table and chair positioned in the only practicable corner, the dormer window high above the avenue de la Bourdonnais offered a distant view of the Sacré-Coeur Basilica upon its solitary knoll. It entailed no sacrifice to leave the room, and this morning, as every morning, he descended seven floors in the caged service elevator, crossed the cobbled courtyard, and gained the street via the porte cochère, making his way along the rue Saint-Dominique into the Latin Quarter. 

He marched back and forth between the Saint-Germain-des-Prés and Odéon metro stations for close to two hours, keeping pace with the perpetual locomotion of the throngs as his lowered eyes scanned the ground in front of him, before sitting on one of the slatted benches dotting the district, part of the ubiquitous mobilier urbain, the majority of which, from the Wallace fountains to the newspaper kiosks to the now virtually defunct vespasiennes, was painted the same deeply chlorophyllic green. He counted the small change he’d gleaned from the pavement here and there—centimes of diverse denominations—crossed the street and entered a boulangerie, where he purchased half a baguette from the female clerk. Emerging from the shop he gripped the bread in his hands in the manner of a dog clenching a new bone between its teeth, with an analogous air of vigilance, avidity, and anticipation. He turned into a side street, found another slatted bench to sit upon in the dappled shadow of a horse-chestnut tree, whose spiky fruit recalled the viral agents he’d once seen depicted in a glossy magazine. A few people straggled leisurely past, a mere trickle of humanity compared to the great murmurations of pedestrians swarming over the boulevards only steps away. He found himself in a tiny square. It was a sultry day late in August but coolly pleasant here. 

After bolting the half baguette, too nervous to linger anywhere, he rose and headed for the Seine. Climbing down a limestone flight of stairs abraded by countless footfalls, he roamed the quays watching the péniche barges, almost awash beneath their brimming cargoes, transporting gravel and sand downstream toward the Norman ports. Ascending once more to street level he proceeded in a direction perpendicular to the river, gazing into boutiques and bistros as he roved, their broad windows shuddering whenever a delivery or public transport vehicle rattled by along the uneven roadway. It was early yet. Waiters had only just begun casually spreading tablecloths over guéridons, distributing plates and silverware from sideboards, positioning wine and water glasses for the luncheon service. 

Turning left at a crossroad, he spotted a rose lying by the curbside, a lone bloom dropped unwittingly by one of the ambulatory vendors, and bending down, he snatched it from the gutter, where it lay like a forgotten relic. It was an intensely claret flower, perfectly formed, delicate, voluptuous, in pristine condition, ensconced within a clear cone of cellophane. Just then, as he straightened himself, an American couple emerged from one of the five-star hotels facing the sidewalk. He approached what he assumed to be the husband and said, “A rose for your lady?” He pronounced the phrase in English but with a spurious French accent, a marketing ploy, as well as a disguise of sorts, as if he were native to this land, as if he belonged here. The man glanced at his wife, who looked motivated to remain aloof from any eventual intercourse or transaction, and explored a trouser pocket, removing a crumpled bluish bill and a slew of coins he presented in an open palm, the poignant, if not pathetic gesture of the traveler unacquainted with a foreign currency. “Take whatever you need,” the man said. He grabbed the fifty-franc note, two ten-franc pieces—the exorbitant tribute of his desperation—and handed over the rose, his pulse galloping like a spooked horse and his tremulous hands just about useless as the couple drifted rapidly away from him. 

He reached the rue de Buci, waiting in line to buy a pack of cigarettes at the tobacconist’s situated there, and afterward walked up the street to the corner café where he consumed in company whenever he had sufficient funds, requesting a demi ordinaire at the bar. The beer was drawn to the twenty-five centiliter mark, the goblet plonked almost insolently in front of him onto a paperboard coaster imprinted with the logo of an obscure Alsatian brewery. Some froth overflowed the goblet’s rim like the spume of expiring waves upon a shore, inching down the bowl and stem to form a foamy puddle around the foot. He took a large swallow of this amber lager, whose peculiar malty aftertaste he’d grown to appreciate, and started recollecting the first time he’d ever drunk beer in his existence. 

One midsummer afternoon his mother permitted him to sip from her bottle as they played gin rummy by the swimming pool while his father was away at work and his sister, Debra, visiting a school friend. They sat together at a red cedar table beneath the thatch awning where they’d taken refuge from the sun, which that day had been especially torrid. The pool was bordered by an ivy-covered hillside scattered with several houses resembling his own—low, rambling, ranch houses of which a quantity had been built in the San Fernando Valley following the Second World War. Sunlight mirroring off patio doors and opaque windowpanes that juddered in the hot Mojave gusts caught his eye now and again. The calefaction of his skin ripened the smell of chlorine, tanning lotion, saline excretions, the evanescent odors of his boyhood. He found the beer immediately defective as children generally do; an acrid beverage only an adult would be grotesque enough to take voluntarily into the mouth. Yet barely two years later, at the wedding of a cousin to which the family had been convoked—he was thirteen or fourteen—he discovered champagne, and the experience had been a revelation. Not the sensual or gustatory aspects, but rather the internal sensations a few coupes induced in him: the giddy weightlessness of the mind, the sweeping away of all impediments, the addictive seduction of finally being unafraid. He came on to the attractive woman sitting next to him, no longer dissuaded by the difference in their ages or her imperial manner, nor by any kind of social conventions or barriers, while Debra, with whom he’d been enamored from the instant he grew aware of himself as himself, who’d splashed their mother’s No. 5 between her breasts dressing for the event, danced with another boy, her full, dark hair and laughter flying everywhere. But for once his jealousy did not punish him, corroding every pleasure—his heart had been inoculated with alcohol, rendered gay and wonderfully immune. 

He lit a cigarette and, his back to the room, considered his reflection in the mirror that ran the length of the metal counter. His image, fragmented by bottles of various wines and spirits below the bright galaxy of sparkling, suspended glassware, appeared spectral, enveloped in the hissing vapors of the espresso machine. 

“Beer does one good by hot weather like today, doesn’t it?” the woman beside him said. 

“How would you know?” he asked. She held a ruby kir royal; for a moment, he studied the bubbles rising to the surface of her flute like spherical creatures seeking escape into the atmosphere. 

“I am familiar with the qualities of beer.” 

“Though not to the point of partaking of one yourself under such favorable circumstances.” 

“It’s only that such a large amount of liquid can be an inconvenience. The facilities are so cruddy in these cafés habitually. You see what I’m driving at, I’m certain.” 

“Yes, I see,” he assured her, and, of course, he did. 

This affable young woman might have been carried off by the human tide at this juncture, as the café filled with a boisterous clientele come for the midday apéritif. But she stayed in close to him, and their bare arms touched two or three times over the next few minutes as they were jostled by new arrivals, which sent the warmth of her intimacy radiating through his body like a drug. Her skin was implausibly soft. By the time she finished her kir the noonday rush had subsided. She raised her flute; the cafetier hurried over. “The same thing for you, a beer?” she asked him. He nodded affirmatively, embarrassed, though exulting inwardly in the economy this would represent. She ordered the round. The drinks were placed before them, their section of counter wiped down with a rag. He thanked her. 

Some air wafted through an open window as they stood together silently, rustling the thin fabric of the woman’s print sundress. A few strands of her long, brunette hair were disturbed, also, or perhaps fell loosely of their own accord across her forehead, that with an unmindful motion she stroked back into place again. He perceived, abruptly, the scent of her perfume, floral notes of jasmine, orris, with some faint, fresh, polar reminiscence of snow. 

“You remind me of someone,” he whispered in a dreamy voice, as if noticing her for the first time. 

He was unsure whether she’d heard him. She responded, though, after a pause, saying, “I do?” 

Digging into her bag, she laid two coins on the plastic saucer they used for change and tips in every Parisian café he’d ever known. “A person from long ago, I bet. People tell me that quite often. It’s strange. There must be something about me.” 

She smiled a little ironically, which heightened the wistful, casual charm of her beauty. “But the past is always present in a way, isn’t it? We all bring it with us, I guess.  It was nice speaking with you.” She touched his forearm, peering briefly into his averted eyes, and exited by the door. She’d left a lavish pourboire—four francs—nearly enough for another draft; he hastened to pocket the money while the server, occupied preparing a sandwich for a hungry regular, looked the other way. Then, moved by a sudden impulse, he ran out into the street after the woman, believing once again the illusion from which he’d fled these many years, that an object of love might save him, however misguided his feelings. But she’d lost herself already in the crowd, and he began to wander, the same forbidden fragrance pursuing him, that imperishable remembrance of her. 

♦ 

Curt Saltzman was born and raised in Los Angeles and now lives in France. His work has also appeared or is forthcoming in Sou’wester, Atticus Review, Into the Void, Epiphany, Gargoyle, and others. He has been nominated for the Best Small Fictions anthology. 

The Delmarva Review, in St. Michaels, MD, provides selected writers with a desirable home in print (with a digital edition) for their most compelling new prose and poetry to present to discerning audiences everywhere. It exists at a time when many commercial print publications (and literary magazines) are closing their doors or reducing literary content. For each annual edition, the editors have read thousands of submissions (at no charge) to select the best of new poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. About half are from the Delmarva and Chesapeake region. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org

 

Author’s Note: I watched my daughter teach a swim class at the local high school pool and was struck by her combination of beauty and ridiculousness. There is a goodbye that comes after high school for many parents, when we realize things will never be the same. This moment felt like a turning point, and I wanted to capture it.

Last Swim Class

In the shallow end of the swimming pool
children surround my daughter. They climb
onto her shoulders, hang from her arms,
say goodbye to their dripping goddess.
I will not think about her leaving tomorrow
for college. Douglas firs lean into the chain link fence.
Between wind-blown boughs, a glimpse
of turquoise. Summer sun illuminates
waves around her, droplets of water
sparkle in her hair. I smile, give a thumbs-up
from my white plastic chair. Her newborn
spine was a string of pearls beneath my fingers.
One minute she is a painting from centuries past,
illuminated in golden light—the next
a laughing girl in goofy pink sunglasses.
Daughter, you cannot see how brightly you shine.
We push quarters into the rusty soda machine.
Cold bottles clunk into our hands. Let’s take our time,
drink this effervescence as slowly as we can. 

♦ 

Pam Crow is a clinical social worker and award-winning poet who lives in Portland, Oregon. Her work has also been published in Ploughshares, Green Mountain Review, Carolina Quarterly, Southern Poetry Review, and other journals. Her book Inside This House was published by Main Street Rag press in 2008.

The Delmarva Review, in St. Michaels, MD, gives selected writers a desirable home in print (with a digital edition) for their most compelling new prose and poetry to present to discerning audiences everywhere. It exists at a time when many commercial print publications (and literary magazines) were closing their doors or reducing literary content. For each annual edition, the editors have read thousands of submissions to select the best of new poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. About half are from the Delmarva and Chesapeake region. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org

Author’s Note: “Petrarch’s Cat” sprang from my experience of trying (trying!) to learn a piano piece by Franz Liszt, based on one of the poet’s sonnets. I had to dig for an English translation, in the process learning a lot more about the poet’s life and stumbling on a description of the supposed cat mummy. An irresistible peculiarity. Add the notion of a long-term, unrequited love, and…

Petrarch’s Cat

MY FIRST SIGHT OF SOPHIA came in the Piazza San Marco in the Italian village of Arquà Petrarca. The plaza was crowded, and it was hard to keep her in sight even though she was, with her red hair, bare shoulders, and long white legs, the most conspicuous person in the village. 

I lost her in the Piazza but saw her again an hour later in the Church of Santa Maria Assunta. She had covered her head and shoulders with a dark silk shawl, and she knelt before a side altar. I was struck by the timelessness of the image; a similarly draped woman might have knelt so at any time in the last five centuries. The air itself was hushed, the candle flames perfectly still, tiny threads of smoke rising undisturbed to the ceiling. The setting offered no chance of conversation, though, so I lingered outside the church. 

She did not emerge, but stayed on my mind as I walked the winding streets to my true destination, the house where the Renaissance poet Petrarch lived out his final years. And there she was, still wearing the scarf, and browsing the displays in the house’s small museum. I kept her in sight this time, moving with her from room to room, and standing a few paces behind her as she looked at Casa Petrarca’s famous oddity, the supposed mummy of Petrarch’s pet cat. To my eye, the object on display looked nothing like a cat, and there is little evidence that Petrarch even owned one, but never mind. A legend is a legend, and tourism matters to small towns. Saint Jerome is said to have had a lion for company in his hermit’s cell, so I suppose Petrarch is entitled to his kitty. 

Here, I realized, was my opening. Unless she read Latin, the inscription beneath the gruesome display would mean nothing to her. I could open that door, charm her, win her over. I knew my Petrarch. 

The beast’s own voice speaks in the inscription, first claiming to rank even higher in Petrarch’s affections than the poet’s eternal, unattainable love, Laura de Noves: 

AAAAnd when I say I had his heart,
AAAWhile Laura play’d the second part,
AAAI must not be derided. 

Then he boasts of preserving the Great Man’s works by driving the mice away: 

AAAEven now, though I am dead,
AAAThose nibbling wretches dare not tread
AAAlOn one of Petrarch’s verses. 

It was the Petrarch house that brought me to Arquà, as a freshly matriculated graduate student casting about for a thesis subject. I was brimming with Renaissance facts and eager to strut, and I stood a while in the gallery, looking the girl over and formulating my approach. I could appear to take her for a native and use my awkward student Italian to ask her help; perhaps she could recommend a pleasant trattoria where we… 

She was in the exit door of the museum, haloed by afternoon sunlight, and as I took a panicky step toward her, she showed me the serene half-smile of a Raphael Madonna, a smile that knew exactly what I was up to, and that sized me up and dismissed me in a single thought. Then she disappeared. 

I hurried outside and saw her at the next corner, tossing a crumpled piece of paper into a trash bin. A tour group, in the care of a shouting guide, engulfed me and slowed my pursuit. By the time I reached the corner she was gone again, into a warren of medieval alleys that gave no sign of her passage. 

Immune to embarrassment, I reached into the bin and retrieved the paper she had discarded. It was her receipt for the Casa Petrarca entry fee, made out in her name, Sophia Altobelli. 

That was thirty years ago. 

THROUGH ALL THESE YEARS, Petrarch has been my field, my niche, the key to whatever career success I have had. 

Petrarch, born Francesco Petrarca. V anguard of the Renaissance. The first humanist, the first tourist, first to climb a mountain just for the view. Coiner of the term “Dark Ages.” Inventor of the sonnet. 

The man who taught the world to pine. 

I can’t say Petrarch has made my fortune, because universities don’t pay that well. I have a modest reputation, all the same. My books on the poet have been well reviewed and have sold decently, given the limits of their subject. They rest even now in the stacks of hundreds of libraries, waiting to be stumbled upon by scholars looking for something else. 

As my expertise grew over the years, I never believed the story of the cat. The author of the inscription lived some two centuries after Petrarch, and the first mention of the cat mummy dates from about the same time. A fine joke on credulous pilgrims, I thought, and my thesis advisor shared my skepticism. 

Still, people relate to the cat. It humanizes Petrarch, just as his decades of devotion to Laura gave the world a model of loving from afar. He ascertained the routes of her daily walks and contrived to be in her path; he sat near her in church; he even bought a plot of land nearby to stay close to her. 

Today, of course, such conduct is called stalking. For Petrarch, it was enough to think she might appear if he dawdled in the town square or the public gardens, and that if she appeared, she might speak to him, or give him a brief smile. In his letters and journals, he berated himself for impure thoughts and for giving himself over to obsession. Yet he also cherished his obsession; it inspired his work. 

Did they know each other or ever speak? There is no record. Apart, of course, from the hundreds of love poems that sprang from Petrarch’s pen between his first glimpse of Laura in 1327 and her death from plague in 1348. And I know that a love such as Petrarch’s can not only survive separation from the beloved but require it. Some women, perhaps most, are loved best from a distance. Lord Byron, after all, had his own verdict on Petrarch: 

AAAAThink you that, had Laura been his wife
AAAAHe would have written sonnets all his life? 

SOMEHOW, I knew the girl was American. The way she crumpled the receipt and tossed it into the trash. The way she vanished so abruptly into the village’s ancient maze of stone- paved passages. That’s how Americans walk, I thought. And that display of flesh. Add in her smile, at once modest and arrogant. An American girl, for sure. 

I had two more days in Arquà and spent most of it wandering outdoors in hopes of another chance encounter. Surely, she had invited me, I thought; surely she expected me to follow. I took dozens of pictures, convinced that the place itself held a key. My scrawled notes gave me a plausible occupation as I sat in one café or another, drinking endless bitter coffee and scanning for her. 

She never re-appeared, and soon I thought of her simply as a future memory, an image sure to recur from time to time. I would smile briefly on my deathbed, and my loved ones would look at each other. Not so much a Road Not Taken—I had not really had the choice, after all—as one of those slightly worn trails that wander off from our main life path. A book of Petrarch’s love poems, coupled with an Italian dictionary, helped me pass my long flight home. 

FOR NEARLY TEN YEARS, the girl obediently played her assigned role in my life. Whenever an unknown woman smiled at me in a bar or on the subway, I returned the smile and thought of Sophia: her hair, her shoulders, her prayerful posture in the ancient church. She also appeared to me in dreams and flashed into my wandering mind in idle moments and odd places, often in much less pious poses. 

Meanwhile I wrote my thesis, got my master’s, got my doctorate, got my first job, and a better second job. I also acquired a wife, a slender pediatrician with no interest at all in Renaissance poetry. 

As to my Sophia, her beauty grew in my memory as Arquà Petrarca shrank into the past. She was safe in that mental realm where she would never age, never change at all. 

Then one day, there she was again, taking a seat on a dais in a Baltimore hotel ballroom at the annual conference of the National Society for Renaissance Literature. I had sat near the back, hoping to slip out early, and at first, doubted my eyes. But the program told me the next panel included a presenter named Sophia Altobelli. 

Her last name had not changed. Nor her hair. The shoulders and legs I recalled so well were demurely covered by jacket and pants. 

I remember almost nothing of her talk. She focused on Dante and only mentioned Petrarch near the end, when she accused him of thrusting himself at Laura but magnanimously forgave him because “he was a cat person, after all.” 

“I know,” she added, “because I’ve seen the remains of the cat at the poet’s house in Padua.” With that, she looked out over the audience and smiled, a smirk really, conveying to me, if no one else, that she shared my own opinion of that bogus artifact. Had she seen me in the audience or somehow sensed my presence? 

Afterward, I went straight to the evening reception on a terrace overlooking Baltimore Harbor, where I staked out a position near the bar and waited. In vain. 

I saw her the next morning, crossing the lobby and dragging a wheeled carry-on case. She glanced in my direction and seemed to pause; perhaps I imagined it. Did she recognize me, somehow, despite the years that had passed? My last sight of Sophia was as she passed through the revolving doors to a waiting taxi. She had not come to socialize, I thought; good for her. She’s busy and a serious scholar. 

Thanks to the printed program, I now knew where to find her—the University of North Carolina—and had a sampling of what turned out to be an impressive library of papers and other publications. Our shared professional interests also gave me an excuse to get in touch. I did not do so, but I still have that program somewhere. 

The immediate effect of this second encounter was to jump- start my own rather becalmed career. I read all of her papers looking for something I could comment on or a tidbit I could develop into an article of my own. And it worked, for a while: I had three significant publications in the next two years, boosting my chances of tenure. I thought, she’s inspired me, hasn’t she? 

Newly motivated, I began to work up a session proposal for the society’s next national meeting, conveniently nearby. They turned me down, but accepted a proposal from my colleague Mel Isaacson, whose work had never impressed me. When the advance program came in the mail, I quickly discovered my Sophia was also on the agenda once again. 

So: A serious scholar, admirable for more than just her looks, and her work was more interesting than mine. 

PETRARCH usually prefaced his poems, and some of his other works, with a pun: “His laurels grew along with his love of Laura.” His poems are also full of references to gentle breezes and light airs, portraying the subtle effect of his beloved on her surroundings. The Italian word he used most was l’aura, the air, which has led some scholars to argue that he fixated on her mainly for the wordplay. Or perhaps made Laura up. 

He found resonance in the fact that Laura died twenty years to the day from the day he first saw her. He claims that first milestone occurred on Good Friday of the year 1327, and the date of that holy day is easy to establish. Laura died on April 6, 1348. That date might or might not be accurate, depending on the reliability of local clerks more than six centuries ago. 

The notion fits well with Petrarch’s own narrative of his life, as a man who wholly devoted himself over twenty years to the praise of a distant beloved. He defined himself, which most people living today would be hard-pressed to do. 

If the dates turned out to be unreliable, would it matter? 

“HAVE YOU EVER MET THIS ALTOBELLI WOMAN?” I asked Mel in the university food court. I was leafing through the advance program, which listed his accepted session. He shook his head. 

“You should go to this,” I said, tilting the booklet toward him. He leaned forward for a look and shrugged. “Not really my field,” he said, and returned to his acai bowl. 

“I saw her once,” I went on. “In fact, we go back a long way.” 

“Really,” Mel said flatly. 

“She does good work. And she’s definitely worth looking at.” 

Mel glanced around the almost-empty cafeteria. “Don’t you know better than to say something like that out loud?” he asked. 

He shook his head slowly while I forced a laugh. The next month he was off to the conference. When he returned, he dropped the thick on-site program on the coffee table in the department lounge. He had marked several pages with Post-it Notes; Sophia’s presentation was not among them. 

“I did check out her session,” he told me over coffee. “Didn’t stay long. It was kind of superficial, actually.” 

“Superficial?” I repeated, and even as I said it, I heard my voice rise in pitch and volume. 

“Whoa,” Mel said, chuckling. “Dial it back a bit, hey?” 

I smiled. “I’m surprised,” I said. “I’ve read a few of her papers and thought they were quite good.” 

“Well, as I said before, not really my field,” Mel said.

“I have a couple of ideas on which she might be a good collaborator,” I went on. 

“So get in touch. All the presenters’ emails are in there,” he said, gesturing at the program. 

I decided to write to Sophia and propose that we work together on something for the following year’s conference, something that might even result in a book. I threw myself into the task and generated a 2,000-word document, which I then slaved to cut to a reasonable email. I finished by proposing that we meet at the conference to discuss it in person. The event was close enough that I could go on my own dime. The message sat in my “Drafts” folder for two days, then I clicked “Send.” 

She replied almost immediately to say she had been forced to cancel her conference trip, so we couldn’t meet, and as to collaboration, she unfortunately found herself fully engaged for the foreseeable future. 

My encyclopedic proposal lingered in my files for a year, then began evolving into my first book. Sophia had inspired me once again. 

She also beat me to publication with a thin but well- reviewed study of Boccaccio. I decided to bring my copy to a conference someday and ask her to sign the title page. I also noted in the author bio that she “lives in the Chapel Hill area with her husband and two young sons.” 

I spent some time online—knowing I was behaving badly— and found her address, then used Google Streetview to get a look at her house. On-screen I saw an abode of brick and siding, with window boxes full of blossoms flanking the door. An SUV was parked in the driveway, its license number blurred out. On the stone entry threshold sat a black cat, benignly surveying its front yard. 

The whole scene had an appealing domesticity. I imagined the life going on behind the brick, under the self-satisfied gaze of the black cat. A settled life of scholarship, modest success, yard work, grocery shopping, contentment. 

And two young sons. Well, I thought, Laura gave her husband eleven children while Petrarch pined away for her. 

While I pined, my university moved steadily closer to shutting down its comparative literature program. Enrollment was scandalously low, alumni financial support had fallen off, and the institution did not have the comfort of a large endowment. The field I loved had become a frill, an indulgence, no match for all that indispensable science and tech. It was only prudent, I thought, to fish in a few other ponds. 

Over supper one evening near the end of the spring semester, I said to my wife, “They have a strong program at UNC.” 

“North Carolina?” she replied. “Are you serious?” 

“Well, my days here are numbered,” I replied. “And why not UNC? I hear Chapel Hill is charming.” 

“And what in the world would I do there?” 

“The same as here,” I said. “They need pediatricians everywhere. Renaissance scholars, not so much.” 

“It’s not that simple,” she said. “What about my patients? What about my parents?” 

“What about them?” I countered. “You can be a doctor anywhere. There’s not so many opportunities in my field.” 

“Then maybe you should think about a new field,” she said, and began to clear the table even though neither of us had finished eating. 

I sulked the evening away in my (our) home office. I had fully imagined a new life in Chapel Hill, building my reputation while rooting for the Tar Heels and seeing Sophia almost every day. 

I updated my curriculum vitae and began making lists of people I could approach for letters of recommendation. Each time I raised the topic of a move with Nicole, she shut down the conversation. 

Mel did not return to the university that fall. He let his colleagues know by email that he’d taken a new job in California. I passed this news on to Nicole, who said only, “I wish him well.” 

I tried to remember the name of the department chair at UNC. Idly I clicked on the UNC website. On the comparative literature program page, I found a box captioned “In Memoriam,” within which I saw the long-remembered face: Older, but still serene and beautiful. Sophia, I learned, had died of brain cancer the previous month. 

I sometimes invite my students to imagine the day Petrarch learned of Laura’s death, of the unrecoverable loss of something that was never his at all. 

He imagined it himself, or at least imagined avoiding that day: 

AAACreator kind!
AAAGrant that ere hers my death shall first be met.
AAASo the great public loss I may not see,
AAAThe world without its sun. 

My male students sometimes identify with Petrarch’s longing, but mostly they think he was a fool. Most of the women I’ve taught have had persistent unwanted suitors and don’t find them appealing. I doubt I have ever known a woman student who had received an original love poem from a guy. Nor can I plausibly imagine any of my male students sitting down and composing such a thing. 

As far as I can tell, they’re stumped by the very notion of a faithful love from afar. 

That was the role Petrarch defined for himself: The chaste and endlessly devoted lover of the perfect woman. That role is not available today. I know, because I tried. 

Petrarch’s legacy has shrunk. The nibbling wretches have been hard at work, right under the cat’s nose. Scholars long ago discarded the term “Dark Ages.” Other poets have been credited with the actual creation of what is known as the Petrarchan Sonnet. His ascent of Mont Ventoux has been endlessly re- interpreted. 

And the mummy? Though the subject of smiles and shrugs among the knowing, it continues to draw modest crowds in the little museum in Arquà, and its epitaph continues to charm. The ugly little thing simply fits the romantic story Petrarch concocted for his own life. And I continue to love it. 

♦ 

John J. McKeon is a Maryland writer with an Irish/German heritage. He grew up in New York City and has always been interested in the immigrant American experience. His career has included work as a newspaper reporter and magazine writer. He is the author of several novels and a short story collection, and his work recently appeared in the Delmarva Review,  Volume 11 (2018) and Volume 16 (2023). Website: www.johnjmckeon.com 

The Delmarva Review, in St. Michaels, MD, offers selected writers a desirable home in print (with a digital edition) for their most compelling new prose and poetry to present to discerning audiences everywhere. It exists at a time when many commercial print publications (and literary magazines) are closing their doors or reducing literary content. For each annual edition, the editors have read thousands of submissions (at no charge) to select the best of new poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. About half are from the Delmarva and Chesapeake region. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org

 

Author’s Note: “Revision” appears in my poetry collection, The Ledger of Mistakes (Terrapin Books, 2023), about caring for my mother during her decline and death. Having worked as a hospice chaplain, I am well aware that the death of a family member often brings up what is left unresolved. In fact, sometimes the urge to rewrite history is almost irresistible.

Revision

Because after widowhood
and a second marriage,
you had five names,
(trochees linked by single stresses) 

which you tried on
like skirts, blouses, jackets,
mixing and matching
according to your mood,
for different occasions,
a pile left on the closet floor—

three of the five for your license,
a different three for taxes,
yet another three for your will— 

who but I to untangle the mess
when were you gone?

Because in the end
you left it to me to decide
who you were—what name
to display I meant to say—
on the two-person headstone,
bought so long ago,
half of which
had been blank for fifty years,

I made the last edit,
struck out the final trochee,
gave you back to Daddy,
God help you. 

♦ 

Kathy Nelson has worked as an engineer, a teacher, and a chaplain. She holds an MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers and is the recipient of the 2019 James Dickey Prize for Poetry (from Five Points: A Journal of Literature and Art ) as well as a Pushcart nominee. In addition to her chapbooks, Cattails (Main Street Rag, 2013) and Whose Names Have Slipped Away (Finishing Line Press, 2017), and her forthcoming full-length The Ledger of Mistakes (see above), her work has appeared in LEON Literary Journal, New Ohio Review, Tar River Poetry, and Valparaiso Poetry Review, among others. Website: https://kathynelsonpoet.com/ 

The Delmarva Review, in St. Michaels, MD, gives selected writers a desirable home in print (with a digital edition) for their most compelling new prose and poetry to present to discerning audiences everywhere. It exists at a time when many commercial print publications (and literary magazines) were closing their doors or reducing literary content. For each annual edition, the editors have read thousands of submissions to select the best of new poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. About half are from the Delmarva and Chesapeake region. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org

Author’s Note: “On Making Marmalade” is an excerpt from my lyrical essay collection, The Blue Years. I wrote it as a love letter, or meditation, on taking our time to do things right. I had never made marmalade before, and something about the process was so beautiful to me. How do we show our love? How do we spend our precious time? How can one translate into the other? There is something incredibly honest and simple about this piece, and in the entirety of the collection, it is something a little different. A moment of sweetness.

On Making Marmalade

IF YOU WANT TO SHOW SOMEONE how much you love them, make them marmalade.

This year has only just begun, and I can already tell you one of the lessons it carries with it: anything worth doing well takes time, and anything you do is worth doing well with patience and grace and a steady hand.

If you’re going to make marmalade, it’s going to take you an entire day. You’re going to go to the farmers’ market early when they open so you can have your pick of the very ripe oranges from the bargain bucket.

Oranges, to me, feel so very California, a staple of my understanding of this place. They grow so frequently that sometimes you will see a tree weighed down by unpicked fruit, so swollen it falls to the ground and rots. So much excess and so beautiful at once. Next to my sister’s house, there is an orange tree. I can see it out the kitchen window when I wash her dishes, and it reminds me of the few weeks I lived with her when I was very sad.

When you get home from the market, you will make tea and wash the oranges in a large metal pot that you fill with water and vinegar. Let the oranges sit for a little while, then scrub them clean because you use the entire orange. Something about this act will feel holy—the scrubbing, most likely.

The oranges will glow, and you will wonder which came first, the name of the color or the fruit. You have a vague memory of wondering this before and asking a friend over drinks in a dark bar. And they knew the answer, but now it escapes you—the answer, not the memory of the drinks.

Not everyone likes marmalade. It’s a specific taste, a balance of the bitter and the sweet. Because you use the rind, you have to peel the oranges, save the rind, and then slice it into impossibly thin ribbons. About halfway through this process, you’ll wish you had decided to do something else with your day. This can be made much simpler if you have a mandolin, in which case use that.

You’ll spend the rest of the day cooking, watching, forgetting, floating around the house while you half do other things, but always still making marmalade. You cook the oranges and sliced rinds with a few cups of water. Cook them long enough so everything starts to wilt. This will take hours upon hours. The steam will be laced with citrus and tangle in your curls and make the house smell sweet and sticky. You fold laundry, and water plants, and let the dog out, and make more tea.

Once the oranges are cooked, you add sugar. More sugar than you’d think—pounds of sugar. You stir carefully as it spits and tries to burn you. This time you have to be more attentive; you have to wait and stir and let it boil but never burn. If it burns, it’s all ruined.  And then you stir some more. Eventually it thickens and cooks down, and you cross some kind of invisible threshold where everything you had starts to look like everything you want: the transference of effort into something entirely new. By this time it’s late afternoon, and the sun in the house is different, and you have to put on a sweater, and the tea you made and then forgot about has gone cold.

There are so many other things you are supposed to be doing today. So many things that need the same kind of tending to, the same care and attention, the same patience. But perhaps an act in one is an act in all. Perhaps some of it carries over like the sweet smell of the marmalade, perhaps not. Perhaps it’s nothing at all.

You set the marmalade out on the counter to cool and thicken, and once it has you spoon it into jars that you’ve saved from store-bought sauerkraut and honey. You take some to your sister and some to your mother and store some in the fridge. And when he comes home, you feed him a spoonful. He kisses you with the bitter and the sweet on his lips, and he tells you it’s delicious. Everything feels good and simple, and you remember that this too took time.

If you want to show someone how much you love them, make them marmalade.

♦

Erin Rose Belair received an MFA in fiction in 2013 from Boise State University. Her story “Rare Items From The Universe” won Glimmer Trains’ Emerging Writers Award. Her other work appears in Narrative, Southern Indiana Review, Greensboro Review, and more. She was a Vermont Center Fellow in 2018 and is currently writing her first novel. Website: erinrosebelair.com 

The Delmarva Review, in St. Michaels, Maryland, was founded to offer writers a desirable home in print (with a digital edition) for their most compelling new prose and poetry to present to discerning audiences everywhere. It has been a time when many commercial print publications (and literary magazines) have closed their doors or are reducing literary content. For each annual edition, the editors have read thousands of submissions to select the best of new poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. About half are from the Delmarva and Chesapeake region. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org

 

 

Author’s Note: This poem was inspired by the time I spent as a writer in residence at the Woodlawn Plantation in Alexandria, Virginia (sponsored by the The Inner Loop literary group in D.C.). While I was at Woodlawn, I learned that the enslaved quarters and much of the evidence of their work no longer existed. It made me think about how easily we accept the narratives we want and how these narratives are presented to us. 

Staging a Plantation Home

Start with curbside appeal: make it appear
majestic. Repaint doors and window frames,
shine up the wrought iron shutters, oil
creaking hinges. Lay down a path
of rounded pebbles, each carrying a story
from the river. Leave the smokehouse,
let its ghosts stir pots of broth, hang
rabbits from metal hooks in the rafters,
stoke the fire. Tear down the slave quarters—
their neglected, stressed timber crumbling
beneath their own weight. Tear down
any building that interrupts symmetry.
Place bowls of plastic fruit on the tables—
apples, pears with red blush, lone
pineapples. Hang birdcages with fake
doves in the music room. Is this the evidence
we need—to believe that someone had time
to think about fruit, a bird’s mourning song—
that these gestures could restore
what has been forsaken—the sweat
of those who built this house, torn
skin, callouses and blisters, faces
whose names have been forgotten
or never known?
Retain only the aseptic lore—
of opulence, Southern hospitality,
gilded staircases. Forget the lives, the bodies,
aaaaaathe truths erased
aaaaaaaaaain this landscape. 

⧫

Susan Bucci Mockler teaches writing at Howard University, in Washington, D.C. Her poetry has been published in numerous literary journals included the Delmarva Review, Poet Lore, Gargoyle, the Maryland Literary Review, The Northern Virginia Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, peachvelvet, Maximum Tilt, Pilgrimage Press, Crab Orchard Review, The Cortland Review, Paterson Literary Review, Lunch Ticket, Voices in Italian Americana, and several anthologies. Her full-length poetry collection, Covenant (With), was published by Kelsay Books in 2022. 

The Delmarva Review is a national literary journal with strong local roots in the Delmarva region. The editors read thousands of submissions annually and select the most compelling new poetry, fiction, and nonfiction for publication. The review is available in paperback and digital editions from the major online booksellers and regional specialty bookstores. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org