Hour of the Ox

By Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello

Winner of The 2015 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry
Selected by Crystal Ann Williams

Hour of the Ox examines the multiplicity of distance, wanderlust, and grief at the intersection between filial and cultural responsibility. Desires are sloughed off, replaced by new ones, re-cultivated as mythos. These poems offer a complex and necessary new perspective on the elegiac immigrant song.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Release date: Nov 18, 2016
• ISBN: 9780822981558

Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello

Gabriele Pedull� (Rome, 1972) is professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of Rome 3 and visiting professor at Stanford. His books include a biography of the partisan-writer Beppe Fenoglio, a monograph on Machiavelli's theory of conflict, a co-edited three volume Atlas of Italian Literature and a best-selling anthology of partisan short stories, Racconti della Resistenza. For his first book of fiction, the prize-winning collection of short stories, Lo spagnolo senza sforzo (Spanish Made Simple) he was selected as one of the 10 best Italian writers under 40 by the literary supplement of Il Sole 24 Ore.

Book preview

Anti-Elegy

For my mother, who twisted her hair

every day into a knot held by

a wooden pin knobbed with jade.

For my father, who combed our island

looking for the most deformed trees,

measured water into the shallow bases

of his bonsai sprigs, waited years

for me to grow into my long fingers.

For Grandmother, whose skin smelled

of seaweed, who asked me always to eat

the sweet abalone porridge with her.

For what the sea gives up and asks

to be returned, for the tide.

For the water deer, who moved and mated

the night my brother first wept, as though

offering their own children to our grief.

For my brother, who did not die

no matter how many times we killed him.

—For we are not our own.

I

Old Country, New World

Although my sweaters were already rolled

and tucked around stone cooking pots,

packages of dried, flat squid and fish

in a borrowed, half-centuried suitcase,

Mama burned a bouquet of candles

that last night, plucking pearls from the cold

bowl of water to string on waxed red threads.

I said Americans do not barter, everything costs

exactly what it says. In silence

she clipped each loose end carefully, close

to the knots, with large, ancient shears.

Although I did not know it, Mama sewed

pearls into my skin: each vertebra, each

tooth and eyelash stitched in salt-laced dew

and the ash of incanted incense, strung

with the thread of old blood. She said white

is funerary back home. Red is for good luck,

still unraveling in her hands and across her lap.

Entire tapestries between us. Mama, don’t

miss me. I will eat enough, I said to the phone,

because I did, and didn’t, could still taste desire

taut as the skin of an umbrella over its ribs.

Here, darkness is pinned back like long, black hair

from the phosphorescence of this new city.

Enormous apples, umbral faces,

a thousand languages in the same breath.

Even the