And after all the lamentations,
tears falling off of our faces
for a wife, a mother dead at forty-four,
she could not be lain to rest.
Nobody mentioned any mortuary passport
needed to carry her onto the plane.
Illegally, they had exported her ashes,
lucky not to have them confiscated —
traveling with the family luggage
twelve or so hours to Milan from Narita
in the chill of the cargo hold.
After all, she had to be brought home.

*

There, from the local railway station's
portico in delicious shade
and that seaport's northern suburb,
its ferries, tugs, container ships
black against an azure skyline,
it was a few hot minutes' climb
there where she was lain to rest,
all correct paperwork being complete,
her illegal sojourn over and done.

*

There, there, there she had come home,
a living face among those roses
on her tombstone in the wall
with photograph's ingenuous look
even as her young son struck it
right beneath a cypress tree
in the little cemetery
at Pegli, in Genoa,
overlooking her Ligurian sea.

*

Black glimmers of its restless motions
out beyond a harbor mole
lured us after night had fallen;
her town's and promenade's lights turned on
and the docks' illumination
multiplied that fairyland.
A straggle of pilgrims strolled the shore,
us brought together by her death,
then separated out down grimmer streets
on a bus ride through the underworld,
that seaport's usual darkness ...
and it was there she had come home.

*

Now then, given the above,
when a wind lifts and life's for the living,
let the jib fill, the boom swing
on a tack across this storied bay . . .
Then, despite love's seasickness
like a grief at the stresses of yesterday,
drop off the old blue-hulled yacht's aft
into a Shelleyan swell —
as the mountains make an end of it
at Portofino, in silhouette,
falling straight down to the sea.

Copyright © Peter Robinson, 2006.

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Peter Robinson will shortly return to the UK as Professor of English at Reading University, after many years teaching in Japan. His poetry publications include About Time Too, Lost and Found, Selected Poems (all Carcanet Press, Manchester), Ghost Characters (Shoestring Press, Nottingham, 2006) and There are Avenues (Brodie Press, Bristol, 2006). He has translated Ungaretti, Erba and Sereni from Italian, and his critical writings include Twentieth Century Poetry: Selves and Situations. Shearsman Books published his Talk about Poetry, a collection of interviews, in November 2006, and will publish his next collection, The Look of Goodbye in early 2008.