-Italians in the basement-

Thanksgiving, and the family gathers.
They enter the house, family by family,
and as they walk inside,
I can hear the warm greetings
from the basement where we'll eat.
It's where the kids gather to run around
going nowhere.
Immediately, the women are drawn together
considering the courses of the meal.
They begin to set the great tables.
The men mingle in small groups,
usually tiered by age.
There's a visible level of respect displayed
along with a visible level of separation.
Age to age, gender to gender.

The women have cooked for days,
in this, the young and the old.
The two long tables in basement are covered with freshly
laundered top-sheets holding the eclectic dinnerware
filled with steaming working-class miracles.
Conversations are animated,
fundamentally Old-Country in their practice,
whose gestures are always magnified at holiday
family get-togethers.

My lovely cousin Shirley has a daughter

who asks if there is life after death.


She’s six,
and where did this question come from, they wonder.

The old folks run for cover like they’re on fire.

Sitting at my desk this early morning years away,
writing acceptance speeches just in case,
I see my enchanting young cousin

begin to swallow her tongue in the face
of her daughter's inquiry.
Shirley is a first cousin once removed.

The tongue is the fatty, drenched, tasting muscle,

necessary for pronouncing “T”s, and helpful with “U”s.

The tongue is a tool used in mocking, dislodging

food particles stuck between teeth, licking the lips

and moistening the labia.
This assists a planned penetration.

But it's mostly employed in and of itself,
for the love of it.

That’s when her eyes closed lazily.

That’s when you learned of commitment,

and she assumed the same.

That’s rather an academic way of putting it.

But my thoughts are of Thanksgiving as we gathered

at the teeming tables in the basement
of my Aunt Ann's and Uncle Frank’s house
on King Philip Street in the south-end of the city,
which as kids we referred to as going “Down the Globe.”

Everyone’s living.

The tongue also sticks out of your mouth

when you die.

It just slips out and hangs there in the open

like it’s longing for a last, sweet breath. 

But the child is asking of matters after-life.

Shirley is a smart young woman. Brandeis, I think.

The child is looking to her with the expression

of a reptile frozen at the end of the branch of a tree

waiting for the Sewing Needle to pass its way.

The reptile ignores the beauty and goes for the movement.

Its tongue is much longer than ours, is sticky,

and rolls out of its maw with lightning precision.

We usually take our time with our tongues.

Arms and hands are flying over the tables.
Nothing's rejected.
Nothing has to be tasted first.

Shirley looks like the Dragonfly

Doomed in its beauty.

I remember as a kid in the basement staring at her legs.

She answers carefully, lying like a trooper.

The child sips chocolate milk, half-spilled

over her wedge of pumpkin pie, listening to her mother.
The child is planning her attack.
Cousin Shirley is gaining momentum

veering from the trap of the common child
toward open air.

But the child’s swift tongue finds its mark.

“Then what about Santa?”


The dry reds are open and breathing their last breaths.
Old Uncle Octavio is fast asleep
on the easy-chair near the furnace,
burning-up half his face like Mercury.
The tables are emptying slowly. The men don't have to work.
Cousin Shirley is whispering: "Sweetie, eat your pie." 

One Christmas past;— A gathering, a feast, a child's inquisition
and a great pair of legs.
Shirley is a first cousin once removed.

I can't ignore the movement nor the beauty.

                                                  Quequechan