WORLD VOICES

SATYR'S WIFE
  BY RITA SIGNORELLI-PAPPAS


Contents

Home
Introduction

About the Author
Arachne
Beautiful Girl Café
Satyr's Wife
I Run into Count Ugolino
Folktale
Riding with Keats
Petunias
Moths
Venice
Semele
Apollo and Daphne
Basket of Oranges
The Road to Sènanque
Mushrooms
Dreamlife of a Mime
Ariadne in Verona
Parmigianino Thinking
On the Appian Way
Pythia: The Process
Mind Clearing in a
    Chinese Landscape

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Writers on the Job
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Thomas E. Kennedy
Walter Cummins
Web Del Sol



Folktale
                               


A woman from Castelvetrano
used to grow roses with
a scent so strong and wild
it still rises in my nostrils
whenever a cloud passes the moon
and pulls sadness down over me
like a veil of black netting.

She hid fish teeth in a jar
of cracked glass, scrambled my eggs
in thick, green oil and the night
her daughter died I watched her
bite a cold wax apple.

She came from a dusty old village
in Sicily, that place where
the bones of lost white mules
sing in the mountains, and oh
I watched her choose her steps
slowly coming down the ruined
trails of this life. Sometimes
her death finds me like a sleepwalker,
lifts the veil from my face
and kisses me on the eyes.





Published in Southern Poetry Review