Perennial

We are alone in your car driving across
northern California hills greener than
any I have seen outside of England, yet
we aren't even talking about the green

swimming beyond the windshield, we are
talking of Italy, our love affair
with the Tuscan hills, brown and gold
hills with their spiralling vines,

grapes, and swallows over the olives
shading the red dirt as we sweep
across these green spring hills where
you live with you wife and babies,

you I would have loved if life
had just twisted in another direction,
the way the alley off the main piazza
in Pisa, where you lived the first

year you were married, turned a certain
way, so you learned to find the market
with the open stalls where they sold
the lemon yellow peppers you loved,

the sweet lemon peppers you ate
that year you lived in Pisa. How
you relished them plain, sliced,
whole, steamed, raw, in salads.

The car twists and we crest over
another hill different from the one
back a way and yet the same green.
I loved you once. But never did.

All those years commuting together
and we never touched. Until the night
before I was to move away, with friends
around us in the restaurant, you pressed

your mouth on mine so the shape of
my mouth after that was never the same.
And I love my long-time husband,
and your wife now is, I know, much

better for you than I could have been,
than you would have been for me.
These hills, so many, almost alike,
green after green. Maybe one summer

we'll meet in Italy, maybe we'll rent
a farmhouse with room for our children.
When I go home to my husband, how
can I fit these greens into our car?

I left a winter overcast sky, gray mud.
But now, after flying back, and
driving home, everything here too
as far as I can see has turned green--

lime, moth, juniper, cypress, mesquite
foaming lace over the grasses so soft,
moist, I want to lie down in the field.
And as we talk of the mail that came

while I've been gone, the native sweet
acacia, huisachillo, blooms a sudden
start by the road, gold as the little
Tuscan peppers, sweet, crunch, home.

poem notes