She’d said she wanted to go back to Naples one more time.

She’d said FDR would always be her president.

She’d said things about my Uncle Leonard

that I didn’t quite understand.

At her death, I was home, the football game on TV.

They’d said she had died.

I’d said something unremarkable because

that was all my lips could say.

It came out all wrong.

It was like the salt sea waters had choked me,

the waves crashing the shoreline of Ischia,

and gray water and rocks.

 

[This poem came from a writing exercise that we did in the Exeter Humanities Institute online pilot program that I’m participating in. We started with a poem written by someone else, and then after reading it aloud several times, each of us taking turns with a line or a phrase or a sentence, we had to choose one line or one fragment of a line and make it the start of our own poem. I took the simple fragment of a line: “she’d said.”

The original poem had been about an aunt, so then I thought about my own great-aunt. I had been thinking about her earlier in the day, while showing a film to my students. It was an old movie — 1934’s Imitation of Life — and the movie famously ends with a funeral procession. During the film, I had been thinking about — and regretting — that I have often been absent from the deathbeds of my family members. As the day wore on, however, my mind moved on to other things: grading papers, making dinner, getting the kids ready for their sleepover at Grandma’s.

I knew I had this online class to attend, but I hadn’t been thinking about Imitation of Life or my great-aunt or anything beforehand. And then we read the original poem together, which really had nothing to do with my own aunt, but it triggered memories for me. It helped, I think, that we had to go around the Zoom at the beginning of class and name our race, ethnicity, and heritage. I named my heritage as being, in part, Italian, and that must have started my brain thinking again about my great-aunt.

When the poem was read over and over, the simple line — “she’d said” — stuck out to me. The things we say can seem unimportant, just off-hand remarks, but other times, those same remarks can have a kind of resonance. They can take on new importance when we hear them again, or think of them again. It was with all of this swirling around in my mind that I began my own poem, the result of which is above.]