December 2018
Marc Alan Di Martino
marcdimartino@gmail.com
My father was a casual collector of semi-precious rocks and minerals. It was a hobby, yet I always saw it as the one thing he had in his life which gave him some illusory semblance of stability. His life had become a shambles, and the moment he began rebuilding it it slipped away from him. It was while leafing through a copy of Simon & Schuster's Pocket Guide to Rocks and Minerals - still available in the same edition he owned - that this poem bubbled up as if from a river of magma deep in the earth's mantle. 
 
Having grown up on the East Coast of the United States, I currently teach English as a foreign language in Perugia, Italy. My work has appeared in Rattle, Gravel, the New Yorker and many other places. I hope to one day publish a little book of my poems.

A User’s Guide to Rocks & Minerals


His bookcase sat on cinder blocks. Divorce
had bequeathed him a succession of one-bedroom
apartments - one had even been a church

in a former life - into which he poured
his soul: his drafting table with its slanted top
and little hidden drawers, his self-help books

with names like My Way, Your Way and The Road
Less Traveled, his aggregation of rocks
and minerals - this last where he pinned his heart

in the off-hours, when not pursuing stability
which craftily eluded him. Rocks had weight;
his hand could feel their mass, their gravity.

Philosophy has attempted to disprove
their very existence, as of all things,
but he believed in them. Having no god

the rocks would do. They offered solace,
his turbulent mind displaced and overrun
by cultural attitudes he couldn’t own.

*

Raised in the shadow of the Vatican
he had been blessed by a Nazi soldier
who, leaning over his perambulator,

pinched his newborn cheeks, Italian-style.
My grandmother stood by terrified, but smiled
thanking the officer for his kind attention

well-practiced in the art of flattery.
Decades later he would court my mother
a proud American Jewess on the make

in Paris & Rome chasing her own devils
the places of her origins erased
or gentrified: Vilna, Lida, Slavic wastes.

Her parents had escaped the storm in time
to forge their way to Boston, Burlington,
elbowed out of Europe by its twitching fear.

She had no interest in lost places, though.
“Polish graveyards,” her mother called them. Rome
had airs of permanence, the oldest town

in all the West. It called her and she came.
Ironic, heavyset, impetuous,
my father fell for her. He wanted out -

Australia or America, è lo stesso.
My mother’s brother had wed a German frau;
my grandparents sat shiva for their children -

so to speak - one married Protestant,
the other Catholic, both of them dogs
gone back to lick the vomit of the past.

*

They met in Villa Borghese on the bench,
the very spot I’d later meet my wife,
then married on the Campidoglio

with civil rite. Marcus Aurelius
mounting his great bronze horse administered vows.
My wife and I would marry there as well

with rare attention to tradition’s lures.
My father’s dream was to leave Italy,
my mother’s to be married. Both were, three times

over. Marriage, American style. Divorce
was in the air back then: progressive, hip.
Dad took us to see Kramer vs. Kramer

when I was eight, thinking it would ease the pain
of separation. I cringed as Dustin Hoffman
trying to cook up French toast for his son

burned his hand on the red-hot frying pan
making a mess of his entrusted role.
The son just looked on in disappointment.

That movie was a mirror for our life.
My father cooked Italian meals, spaghetti
reheated in his mother’s iron skillet

till it was black and crisp, drizzled with cheese,
punished me with odious vegetables.
I was the conduit for his angry spells

and I resented it. Every so often, though,
he’d open one of those drawers in his desk
pull out a tray of vibrant minerals:

round geodes, spiky quartz and silky slate,
mica which turned to powder in my hands
flecked by a billion years of sediment,

weightless pumice, granite, obsidian,
the names alone enough to set me dreaming
of further atmospheres. These fragments he kept

kept secrets of their own, had fallen to Earth
from spacetime, or grew organically
in igneous niches of our planet’s skin.

He had collected each stark specimen
himself on outings with old college friends.
He showed me how to use Coca-Cola

to clean the dirt off rocks and polish them
with a scuzzy toothbrush. “Don’t drink this,”
he warned as I watched it bubble and fizz

like hydrogen peroxide on a wound.
“Think what this stuff does to your intestine.”
I’d look down, terrified, taking the advice.

*

It seems those rocks should be with me today
since he is not. I often think of them,
that he is somehow them now, every atom

gone home to roost, bound to some new being.
I am not lying when I tell my daughter
he is a star. He’s not in heaven,

I explain, but what we call the cosmos,
everything that ever was or will be,
a concept which may expand or contract

over time. It is provisional, that’s all
we know right now. But she doesn’t ask
hard questions yet, just looks up longingly

at the few visible luminous stirrings
above us. Is that one him? she asks. Yes,
and that one and that one and that one, too.
© 2018 Marc Alan Di Martino
Editor's Note:  If this poem(s) moves you please consider writing to the author (email address above) to tell him or her. You might say what it is about the poem that moves you. Writing to the author is the beginning of community at Verse Virtual. It is very important. -FF