Cattafi's 'La discesa al trono', 'The Descent to the Throne', a response

Well, I've been reading Cattafi for a couple of months, at night in bed, early in the morning, in the car in the parking lot at work. It's Winter Fragments, selections from 1945 to 1979, translated by Rina Ferarrelli.

Last night, "The Descent to the Throne." Cattafi wrote

We're not stopping to think it over
seated at the top of the stairs
we're gathering strength
alms
before undertaking
the descent to the throne
and squandering everything
on the rough intoxicating
rock bottom of desperation.


Now, I want to tell you that the first thing that happened was, I didn't get past the second line for a while. My mind filled with a memory. Four or five years old, sitting at the top of the stairs at home, listening to the adult voices below, sure I am missing something, if only because my mother's laugh sounds so real, more real, when I cannot see her face--- this would be the laugh I heard later, in the dark when we stood on stage and she sat in the audience.

In the same moment (maybe a split second later) I bumped into the image in Frost's poem, "Home Burial." The grieving mother sits at the top of the stairs, alone, but, as dreams and visions allow, I am both beside her and beside the father who stands at the foot of the stairs, shovel in hand, his own heart broken. Her skirt spreads around her like a collapsed tent--- buries her from the waist down. He stands like a useless warder of a menagerie whose wild animals have all escaped, who must account for their loss. He must bury the dead child.

I think of my mother in the thick of a summer Saturday night in the the early '60s. The house is full of her sisters and their men, the handsome Jesuit seminarians sent to assist at the church for the summer when Boston Catholics come to the beach, swelling the congregation.

Everyone agrees my mother is beautiful and good. No one knows how, at dawn, she sits at the top of the stairs alone, and weeps.

I am in bed listening to the racket of katy-dids and crickets. The moon is caught in the net of the birch's branches. Cattafi's poem finally finished, my response caught like a wriggling fish only half hooked, I can turn off the light. But I can't quite sleep.

This is what poems are supposed to do, I think, thread our lives with others', both real and realized. This is their gift.