for Katy Phillips (1935-2022)
Like fume, the switchback road
coils across the foothills
of Cortona—up, up
to a precipice: drop-off
for picture-takers. From here
we proceed on foot, up steep
cobbles toward the hidden
heart of town. Try me,
whisper the passageways
opening to right and left.
But we’re on a mission; only
a Duomo completes Cortona.
We’ll find it at the end
of this street: piazza, church,
views of the Tuscan valley
below—with blue-green wicks
of cypress lining serpentine
lanes—and look! Halfway
to the horizon: a walled garden
of slab stones, evenly laid
like biscuits on a tray
for tea. The cemetery.
+
This morning, Katy, opening
the email announcing your death,
I thought of your need for travel.
The widowed journey you took
back to coastal Ireland,
to retrace itineraries
you’d followed as a bride
in a passenger seat—as if only
by stepping again into spongy
moss, hearing the sea-spray
slosh in a creviced bowl
of basalt, could you make that island
your own. Out of you
there soon came pouring
poems you’d waited for,
with their warm breath and wet
gaze, at which people felt
a shiver of recognition.
+
In Catholic murals, saints
tote emblems of their violent
leave-taking—a spoked wheel,
a dish of eyes—to remind us
that everyone needs a way
to display pain. A place
to revisit the past—to gasp
and sob and possibly surrender
the last of their resistance
o more life. There we go,
with beads and glue and glitter,
to open the luminous scrapbooks
our brains have been stitching
each night in dreams—
books we’ll never finish
in time to share with a friend.
David Southward
Judge’s Note:
This poem deserves praise for its use of inventive language, such as “slab stones, evenly laid / like biscuits on a tray / for tea” and “the luminous scrapbooks / our brains have been sketching / each night in dreams.”