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Arrival at the Prealps

Smith, Dave

Groggy as souls just arrived at Milan's airport,

we wave to a sad-eyed native holding up our name.

And when I ask, the gentleman says little, driving

the black Mercedes so it clings around the curves

like a coon hound in the night wood where once

my uncle took me hunting. I still remember red

eyes in the flashlight's beam, stars above the tree.

So, like a child, I ask the man again. He shrugs.

Maybe he doesn't understand that its mountains

whose name I want in my language, black walls

I see branching above what I know is Lake Lecco,

my map telling me no more than its deep pure blue.

No stars come in this early dusk, pink hazy light

soft as a woman's slip pooled on bone-tile floor,

but we feel they must be close as he rocks ahead.

I speak more slowly to touch his ancient Italian

understanding, though he only slides the big smooth

wheel soundlessly so the heavy carriage we're in

swoops a ridged road as if it's inevitable. My wife

grins, swaying. Because I've been reading of wars

here, and Hemingway, who brought up his woman,

I say aloud like a lesson he loved death. And beauty,

which makes you sigh at the oleander everywhere

burst white, the thick cage of wisteria on poles,

roses the color of blood, and sun, and your thighs.

Once started, it's easy to say together over and over

how perfect everything we pass here is, road rising

ever gently, his driving so buoyant along the cliffs

only the deep drop makes us gasp. Then the Villa

Serbelloni breaks onto the windshield, a dream

half-imagined we must be stepping into, small bags

placed neatly on the grass, ethereal hostess waiting

as the engine revs a little. Then, before he goes,

he says, commandingly, "Pre-Alps" and adds it is

"like what comes before the real thing, Signor,

as life comes before death." Mirrored in his glass,

I watch the godly black car start back to town

until he and it sink into the gorgeous shadows of

granite and the mile-deep blue of lakes at Bellagio

where we are led to enter as if we have come to stay.