Marostica
by K. E. Duffin
The name leaps across into English,
dragging erroneous connotations of marrowbone and stick, the defiant
chant of “sticks and stones” ringing among its misinterpreted
syllables. But pseudo-etymology contains a truth: everything here
is about attack and defense. A zigzagging wall like a miniature
Great Wall of China sutures the green mountain slope with jagged
earth colors; a toy-like castle seized from a northern fairy tale
punctuates its steeply meandering sentence with a full stop at the
summit. That crenellated stare reaches everywhere, bristling like
the spiky word itself. There are two castles: an upper and a lower,
a quicker and a slower, a hermit and a glad hander. Both are warily
regimental. One spies the sunrise and sunset first and shouts in
burnt sienna like a scout. The other is pink after a few drinks
and occasionally blurts, “Come in.” That chessboard
out front like a welcome mat has been swept clean, awaiting sun
and shadow, rookless geometry at loose ends, ready for a mathematical
shoot-out. The square contains a square that contains sixty-four
squares: it’s all about containment. I think I am in Arabia
or California because the earth is so unprotected from the sky.
Little spectator cafés are closed for the afternoon, their
chairs stacked like so many black-and-white insects on their backs.
In the lower castle, there are faded paintings from the fifteenth
century on walls decorated with a pattern of rose-orange flowers.
Here age is not an opponent to be outwitted and captured, but part
of the honorable company of desperate and wary things. Buildings
and people stand as equals in a caressing light that is western,
arid, and clear. A defunct little train station without a train
sleeps in the sun, patched with signs, with words from a language
that has veered away from Latin and yet contains its fossil imprint,
its vestige. Sounds drift through time, are stabilized a little
while, then vanish, to be guessed at by the sluggish trilobite of
the ear.
Peaks to the
north seem to have been dipped in honey—the “sticky”
in Marostica—attracting a swarm of huge flies, or eagles,
their size distorted by distance. A closer look proves the swirling
shapes to be descendants of Leonardo’s flying machines, hangliders
in phosphorescent colors, going round and round like a kettle of
hawks on an updraft, each with an antlike dot suspended below. Cradles
for windcatchers, dandlers of daredevils. Further north, the slopes
zoom up, sheer chipped reaches of shattered rock, with tiny-headed
pines at their acme. Big, draggy clouds sweep back and forth far
above, skimming crags pale as old sea cliffs. Villas are sunk in
valleys of eternal shadow. I prefer the plateau, the sun-thralled
castrum, with its panoramic view, its simple stage set of day and
night, shadow and light. There you can wait, clear-eyed and alert,
for the checkmate that is coming.
More essays from AGNI 61 by K. E. Duffin: Palladio | Bronx
(AGNI 61)
K. E. Duffin's book of poems, King Vulture, was published by The University of Arkansas Press in 2005. Her work has appeared in Chelsea, Denver Quarterly, Harvard Review, Hunger Mountain, Midwest Quarterly, The New Orleans Review, Partisan Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Rattapallax, The Sewanee Review, Southwest Review, Verse, and many other journals. She is also a painter and printmaker. (4/2005)
