Chestnuts for Verdi

CHESTNUTS FOR VERDI / Roberta Spear Loose, drifting in pools of black water, the gravel slushes as a pair of peahens crosses the path, stabbing for seeds. The one I gather from a tuft of grass pushing up the border is too large for them. A chestnut, hard and glazed, like the belly of a mare or the unbroken shore of a piano where a singer leans, pressing out the notes into the morning's stillness. And he is there, arched to the yellowed keys, for the memory is as soft as the fingers cupped around this fruit. The sunlight slips between the salon drapes and the first wagon filled with oak, birch and chestnut, enters the scrolled gate. Each stump is waiting for the gray lip of soil with a patience only trees have, while the hens and geese come and go, like old lovers or soldiers who have nothing but the strange music of their own tongues. The paths shoot off everywhere. Only the woman who parks her bike at the maestro's gate and takes us in knows where they all go— to a web of rooms unlit by the morning and to a silence as false as the crock of flowers in a Milan cemetery where the dead are so famous they can't be imagined. Yet the chestnuts bulging in her pockets are there for anyone to see. Now they can bring fire to a man's touch 46 · The Missouri Review and they'll do nicely in a pudding. And the branches tipped with snow which they have left behind, rise and fall like heavy arms coaxing the air, keeping the music of the earth close to the earth. Roberta Spear THE MISSOURI REVIEW · 47 ...