From the Fire Hills

Pantelleria

67 PANTELLERIA Its name fallen from Arabic and any love of mutability—Daughter of the wind relieved from the faces of postcards in their wire bins in the bar at the end of the broken promenade, even in script angular and floating on the unreal sea of that reconnaissance photo we saw in the bookstore and were stunned by, imagining the bombs in ’43, plumes like empty captions in cartoons, like the Trojan farewell to Dido in her anguish, a goodbye that sounded eerily like not sounding, not saying, like the wind that stirs tonight the chalk-white roads, a kind of bucolic— not nomadic, Nubian or Eritrean, not Abyssinian, but ghostly, elevated, of the epic. Though at night, Tunisia turned its head to us and winked, though what we ate, distinctly Moorish, was unreachable—cinnamon and sage, blood orange, the caper’s pickled blossom— still the sea never warmed those shins of lichened shallows—black-blue, wine-dark waters cold 68 as late afternoons we consoled the abandoned terrace, dreamed out past fantastic monoliths— one resembling the elephant, might of Carthage, its stone trunk arching over the pleasure boats, still others guarded by water and the strict sentinel of the tongue. We watched the sea hurry these names on volcanic backs, our feet caught in the Mirror of Venus—this, the name given a lake of clay the turgid tourists cloak themselves in, a lake that kept birthing itself, white and white and white, from whose shores we looked down to the Bay of Five Teeth: pumice cones of lava black as tar or a mother’s midnight voice calling to her daughter in the rip tide, carried farther, beyond the cuttlefish patrolling foam, the eel’s soft suture in water’s skin. From far enough away, even Dido looked content, inviting flames to shake out sparks above her city, as the tourists descend the mountain, their children palled in the privilege of this island, their small cars, humped in baggage, lumbering down. ...