Basilico

1

Three plants
in one styrofoam cup.
A gift from a friend.

Their smell dissolves
the afternoon, brings back
my grandfather's garden. Sunday

and pomidoro sauce in a cast iron pot,
guests arriving in old cars from the city
soft nights, mandolins and laughter

under the window where I fought
off sleep, then rode
my mother's clear soprano into dreams.

2

Something's wrong. Flooded
with sun on the windowsill, their leaves
go brown at the edges.

I drench them with mist
and sing to them in southern Italian
but it does no good. They suffer

as we do from too much
togetherness. I pull away
the puffed-rice cup, crumble

the earth ball and tug their nest
of roots apart. It sounds
like thin stitches ripping.

3

In their new pots, they have the look
of radical exiles, resentful
and sullen. I put them out

in the spring sun to heal. All evening
at the concert hall, Le Ballet Jazz
erases their claim on my heart

until I wake in the dark and feel them
wilting under a late frost.
I go out on bare feet and retrieve them.

4

All day I set them in different windows
following the sun, watching
the light arrange new moods

for the house. When evening comes
I spray their limp
dishevelled leaves and give them

up to the dark. Awake
with the first light, I'm surprised
and happy to see their pumped up leaves

drinking the dawn. I decide
to celebrate, pour a cold beer
into the tall green glass

I found in my mother's cupboard
after she died. I hold it up
to the window, watch

the bubbles rise and bolt
it back. A warm jolt spreads
from my stomach up to my brain

and it's only then that I notice
how their stems lean
over, trying to sleep. So I push

a pair of stained chopsticks
into the soil and tie their heads
up straight. But when I pull

back to admire my work, the edge
of my hand brushes the glass
and it falls to the floor. The sound

it makes as it shatters trips
the same stab of panic I had
to control as a child whenever she left

the house. I see her perched on a stool
at the stove in her small kitchen, drained
by cancer, cooking the last

meals of her life. I bend
and sweep up the curved shards, green
as my birthstone, brokenly

musical as they slide
from the dustpan into the trash.
The room fills with more and more light

and it all comes close again. Her wisdom.
Her temper. Her cuisine. No one
has ever got her tomato sauce right

though she gave us her secret freely:
Five or more leaves of fresh basil.
Half an afternoon at moderate heat.

 

© George Amabile