Night-Song in Verano

NIGHT-SONG IN VERANO / Robert Vasquez for Peter and Phil A strange song blooms in the dark. It's my neighbor, born in a toolshed during the war, and she sings a song the widows of Italy sung to old men and the children of dead fathers. She and her mother sailed out third class in '48 and waved to no one on the soldierless docks. Her mother let go of her years ago, and waits six miles north under fine Italian marble that followed the same ocean route. And now the long vowels call out to the fields of childhood. An old song reappears, hidden cargo ferried between the continents of the dead and the living, and rises above the whirr of laundry and crickets. A song clear as the cold-blue moon ladders up and lingers, a high note slow as the sky's stone, song and stone burning with the echo of light so far-off like the music a woman clings to, having crossed the black Atlantic and no longer pressed for time. The Missouri Review · 173 ...