The Dream of the History Prize


When all my memories
were her memories
and she’d lost them
(I still had them),
I dreamed

…in school,
a tree with a scroll
hanging from it,

the prize she’d win
if she were in school.

I’d lived all 
my life in school
and had no history
other than hers

which she had lost,
so, in my dream,

I won the History Prize.





City and Story
 
​
“Rome was real to me!” my mother, Martha, used to say, “the history, the ruins.” She told me about Saint Peter being crucified upside down, and Saint Paul being beheaded, his head bouncing three times to prove the truth of the Trinity. She’d been taken as a child to see three fountains that sprang up where his head bounced.

When I finally visited a Roman catacomb, I heard two people speaking: Martha, dead eleven years, was saying she no longer remembered which one was crucified upside down and which one’s head bounced.

The guide was saying Saint Jerome had come here to visit the remains of martyred popes. He led me to Saint Cecilia’s tomb. A prone marble figure with a seam across its neck showed Cecilia, beheaded like Paul. The spread fingers indicated a number by which she too proved the truth of the Trinity.

Real and unreal, quick and dead, I travel with Martha, Jerome, and Cecilia.