Copyright © 2002 LeeAnn Heringer
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Copyright © 2002 LeeAnn Heringer
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Arezzo has an antique fair 1st Sunday of the monththe train to Arezzo is a skipped stone. a flying fish over moderate seas. a hooked marlin. a humpback whale straining to lift itself from the water. it rattles and creaks. it rocks slightly as it heaves itself from black tunnel to black tunnel in a high arc, fins back, across hillsides of morning light. I expect the next Hemingway is watching from an open window with thrown back shutters, leaning on his elbow with a morning cafe, for the face of a woman, any woman, in the train window as it passes, trying to decide how that one would torture men. from inside, I see brief moments of vineyards, yellow with autumn. corn fields. nurseries of new olives. tight symmetric groves of sliver green trees with 20 foot limbless trunks I think might be some kind of nut, but they're too far away. there are walled cities and castles the color of stone and brick. of sunlight and mud brown. of every color of red. and in the middle between tunnel 5 and tunnel 6, at the end of a rough dirt track, at the top of the hill in a grove of narrow Tuscany cypress was a sky blue house with 3 walls and most of a roof. the blue paint and white wash swirled together by hand I thought only a Soho artist alone in loft with 3 joints could achieve. a house with dark shutterless windows and a yard full of sheep eating yellow flowers with a brown eye as large as my hand. I could hear the sheep bells. I could smell the fresh plowed field through the open window. Dean was asleep. his head curled against the orange, winged headrest of the bucket seat. his hand loose and boneless in mine. only 1 of us saw the sky blue house on the train to Arezzo. only 1 of us had the sudden irrational desire to leap out and live there forever. |
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