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I was walking in Durham, North Carolina with my friend Ralph Savarese on Saturday night last, the two of us with guide dog Nira. We decided to buy bottled water in a convenience store, one of those places that once was a gasoline station but now lives on without pumps, it’s windows barricaded with cages, a stripped bicycle leaning beside the front door. Entering the place we became instant characters in the drama of poverty meets disability, a show one never really gets used to.

Proscenium: sparse.

Man behind counter. Ralph. Steve. Yellow Lab with highly recognizable guide dog harness. Second employee with mop.

Counter Man: “That’s one of them Hero Dogs!”

Ralph: “Yeah, that’s a guide dog.”

Counter Man: “That’s one of them Hero Dogs!”

Ralph fetches water.

Counter Man: “That is the dog who goes to Heaven. Only one dog goes to Heaven, but Allah lets the one dog go because he hides the people from the rock.”

Mop Man: “That’s a SERVICE DOG! That’s a SERVICE DOG! Yep! That’s a SERVICE DOG!”

Counter Man keeps talking about Mohammed and rocks. Both employees are very happy in their respective ways.

For my blind friends, the photo above depicts the “Cheesus Christ” cheese grater with the slogan “Our Grate Lord”. One thinks immediately of the Monty Python line: “Blessed are the cheese makers.” One thinks also of possible heavenly directives: “Thou shalt not scrape false graters”. But I’m wondering what kind of cheese he’d like? Not Romano.

 

Pearls: or How the Tenor Learned to Sing in French

 

 

Listen: Caruso is holding his nose, practicing French. With his eyes closed he sees an onion field, a galaxy of  orange butterflies. Des cieux, des yeux, he sings, the heavens, the eyes, the heavens, the heavens, the eyes. His tongue can’t locate the difference. What if he were to sing under water? What if he were to kiss a priest? Eat an onion? He tightens his fingers over the fleshy bulb of his nose. 

This is how he grows, with a decisive loss of air, a wicked pinch.

Sweat begins under his shirt.

It is wonderful to be day-blind in the immense sunlight. 

Des cieux…

He sways on his tiny, girlish feet.

His tongue tastes the sweet kernels of nuts.

He hears the inward roaring of blood in his ears.

Des yeux…

The eyes, the eyes, and the dim, undetermined sense that he is about to fall into a serious mood. He is helplessly in love with two sisters, Rena and Ada Giachetti. Both are sopranos, both have raven hair, those dark tresses that give up traces of red in the afternoon light. 

With eyes closed, his nose pinched, his tongue spastic with wet aspirations, he thinks of Rena drawing aside her luxuriant, free falling hair, exposing her tender white neck.

There is a place behind her ear, where, as she lifts her hair he can taste the minty reeds of Lake Lentini.

**

Rena’s pearls have broken loose from their necklace and she gathers them up and carries them in her lifted dress. She bears them across the portico as if they were the precious ingredients of a soup. 

Poor Caruso, struggling with his French. The man is out of his mind with Gallic frenzies. He wanders the kingdom of vowels like a lost childIn just a few weeks he must sing of pearls, must transform himself into a pearl diver. 

She finds him seated at his white piano, sight reading from the dreaded score, humming cautiously, his fingers depressing keys.

“Hey, Nemorino,” she says, “Lover Boy, here is your Adina, ricca e capricciosa fittaiuola …

And he looks up, dazed as an alter boy who has been fumbling with the towel and cruets.

He smiles the great smile, the sunlight smile, sunlight through a garden wall.

Quickly she passes her hand over her lips, for he seems about to speak.

She carries the pearls in the tent of her lifted skirts and now sits astride him on the wide piano bench. 

She throws her arms around his neck and cries, “I won’t leave you any more!”

Pearls are falling everywhere. 

Rena unbuttons her dress.

And Enrico Caruso enters the still country, a place thick with plants and emerald light.

Her breasts are pendant against him. Her unbound hair falls over his eyes.

If his fingertips could speak they would stammer. 

Lord knows his mouth can’t speak. She has swiftly opened his pants, and O so expertly! No pinch and ouch of heavy fabric. 

His brains go whirling through the white and yellow marguerites, such flowers at sunset! My God!

She is dropping pearls into his pants!

Caruso’s voluminous, satin underwear is open and in go the pearls, cool as fish eggs. 

“Little pearls,” she murmurs, “you swim with them, carry them to me from the bottom of the bay!”

And now she presses them into his mouth, one by one, little white grapes of the sea.

He is Demosthenese of Naples! 

 

**

 

 

Family name like any, up north

Meant cracked pepper in the lamb

 

Wormwood in vodka

Snow from heaven

 

& heaven was the wind

They are nothing

 

Up north

The gray dawn

 

A relief map

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By Andrea Scarpino

 

Many years ago when I was struggling through an unpleasant break-up, my friend Gracie drew me a picture of my cat, my apartment, hearts, smiling faces. Across the top of the page, she wrote, “Andrea, these are all the good things.” She was 6 or 7 years old.

 

Yesterday, I cried at my desk after a particularly hard phone call. “Everything sucks,” I typed into Google Images—my best teenager impersonation. And then I went to buy wine. And after the wine store, I crossed the street to buy a bouquet of tulips, orange-pink bursts of color. And at the flower shop, I found small terrarium plants and moss to fill four hanging globes we often use for tea lights. And I came home again, and turned on the radio, and planted the plants in their new globe homes, and texted with friends who were kind. And Zac and I went for a run.

And everything sucks. And these are all the good things:

 

1. Wine that is full and rich, that streaks the glass dark red.

 

2. Terrarium plants hanging in a window, green leaves poking from each globe’s opening.

 

3. Green tea sweetened with stevia.

 

4. The sky. And people who watch the sky, who know the scientific names of clouds, who care about stars, asteroids. People who understand that “Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded,” as Lawrence Krauss says.

 

5. Apple trees white with blossoming.

 

6. Baby elephants. Seriously.

 

7. People who care enough about food to slice carrot after carrot into exactly the same size and shape, bake cookies with homemade butter, cure bright yellow lemons just to have them on hand. People who sit for hours savoring every bite of a meal. Who will remake an espresso if it’s not perfect.

 

8. Handwritten cards. Packages that arrive in the mail unexpectedly.

 

9. Beautifully designed poetry books and music albums.

 

10. Handmade jewelry.

 

As my friend Courtney says, “The world is a terrible place. And chocolate chip cookies are delicious.”

I love opera though my joy is complicated. As a child I found a Victrola in my grandmother’s attic. I was blind and often terribly alone. I wrote about this in my memoir “Eavesdropping” where I describe how I heard Enrico Caruso’s voice for the first time on a solitary afternoon. From the start I was hooked on great singing.

I’m sure all opera lovers have stories like mine. Someone in Nebraska hears Jussi Bjorling on the radio and the die is cast. My sister heard Maria Callas as Medea. For my grandmother “the voice” was Lily Pons. It doesn’t matter who the singer is, the moment is greater than a particular voice–“the moment” is liminal, to borrow anthropologist Victor Turner’s term–you step outside the small circle of your life, cross an invisible threshold and you’re never again the same. This liminal and transformative experience is true for all arts–it’s even true for sports or peering through a telescope. For Galileo “the moment” came when he saw the valleys of the moon, valleys like the fingers of a giant hand. Whatever “the moment” may be in your life nothing afterwards is ever again the same.

Why then am I a cultured ass? Because culture depends on discernments and comparasons refined and even redacted by one’s earliest artistic discoveries; because nothing ever again rivals Caruso or Shakespeare or Fats Domino and there’s not much one can do about it minus a large dose of comic irony–a fancy way of saying “unless you love an art form more than your own nostalgia and sentimentality” which is no easy thing.

So I hear a tenor and instaneously wave my opera lover’s scepter, a wand of tin foil and dime store glitter, an amateur fetish but reliable. “He’s no Caruso!” I shout. I make a little abbra cad abbra gesture to the empty air. (All critics do this, even professionals, though they won’t tell you. I once saw art critic Clement Greenberg abbra cad abbra-ing all over the place at an academic conference…)

Pushed to extremes such knee jerk wand dabbing robs a man or woman of irony and wonder. “He’s no Caruso” means almost nothing, for even if you grant the tenor from Naples is the foundational voice of Italian tenors (the metaphor is Pavarotti ‘s) who wants to stay forever on a solitary floor of the building? The answer is the child wants to–the child would prefer to live forever with the neuro-plastic charge of first hearing a voice, a voice like milk and iodine, a voice that calls you into a secret house, a house of candles and moonlight.

Culture depends on comparisons. Discernment, taste, ambition, all are built from the declaration “He’s no Caruso” but the ironist knows this is a fine thing. A necessary thing. A beautiful and liberating thing.

 

 

 

Those of us who are parents, and getting older,

Long, as tonight, for our children to stand

With us, looking at the stars. Here it is, 

Eight thousand years later, and I still remember. 

Blindness

 

The eye, a sparrow really,

Unfeeling 

In its church–

The eye, half-defined

Whelms in first light. 

 

I lift a pail of ashes,

Walk to the garden….

We are lonely. We must not say so. For me this loneliness stems from boyhood, a shadowy and stark calendar of disability solitudes. Sometimes, even in the midst of people I’m so alone I ache. I also inflate balloons, throw voices, make up songs that only the most deliberate and obstinate children could enjoy. And so oddly, by the age of ten, I was good at collecting children in laughing clusters.

 

Remember when we put mother’s shorts on the dog? When we tied a string to a wallet, hid in shrubs, and fished for priests? That was some good fishing! (Old priest bends to wallet, wallet jumps, priest follows with a wondrous hopping waddle, a movement never before seen in nature.)

 

In general I prefer the poets of loneliness. Their ranks include Cesar Vallejo, Osip Mandelstam, Auden, Dickinson, Trakl, Bly, Harry Martinson, and Pablo Neruda. There are so many more. Yannis Ritsos, Cavafy, Richard Hugo, Lorca, James Wright.

 

I’m laughing, high in the branch of a cherry tree, the bird beside me named Diderot. We shall die eating cherries and converse meantime in separate languages.

 

Old man in corner grocery, Manhattan: "This ain't no damn food. This ain't no damn food at all!"