Trastevere

Oh, sometimes I get a good feeling, yeah . . .

—Etta James

—And I can see clear across the Tiber, I can take any of seven ancient bridges to Trastevere where my mother’s wearing purple—not the funereal purple of flowers, or the purple veins flowering to the surface of the skin of the dying, her dying— but the suit she found the rare Italian nerve to finally buy after a week wandering radial streets around Santa Maria.

And in the market where it doesn’t matter if I’m underage she endows me with the secret of Wild Turkey, oh, wildly underestimated. And later we’ll go looking for that restaurant as shops roll shut and old men fix scooters by lamplight, their radios throating staccato soccer games. And our feet are light over cobblestone made from volcanic ash—blasted, blanketing, hardened in the hills; stones, which, they say, in summer (only a month or so away), give under the pressure of heels.