The Ha-Ha, Part II: I Cry My Heart, Antonio
—at Dal Pescatore, Cannetto sull'Oglio, just outside Mantova



It's just as the waiter has brought us
a single buttery dumpling
stuffed with pecorino, parmigiano, and ricotta

that arrives after the porcini mushrooms
and the seafood risotto
and before the snapper with tomato and black olives

and the duck in balsamic vinegar reduction
that I touch my napkin
to my lips and say, "There are no words to describe this"

and then feel the sting of tears as I remember
where I'd read these words,
in that book about the trial of the English pedophile

and child murderer who delighted in recording
the final moments
of her victims' lives, the screaming, the promises not to tell,

her own tapes used in evidence against her yet thought so horrific
by the judge that
he ordered them played in a sealed courtroom

and then, in the public interest,
to a single journalist
who would only say, "There are no words to describe this."

•

And even though the waiter arrives at that moment
to clear away plates and pour more wine
and ask if everything is good, if it's all to our satisfaction,

still, Barbara bends close to me and asks if everything's okay,
says I seem a little upset,
and I cover by telling her the story that Mark's cousin Antonio

had told me about this prosciutto he'd bought
and had put in his basement
for curing so it would turn salty and sweet and delicate all at once,

but something went wrong, and one day
he went down to check
on his prosciutto, and it was maggot-ridden and moldy,

and here Antonio shakes his head and looks at me
with a sad smile and says,
"I cry my heart, David," and only later do I realize

I've used this story as a ha-ha, which is not a joke but a landscape trick
from 18th-century England,
a sunken fence used to keep cows at a picturesque distance

from the manor house so they can be seen grazing on the greensward,
kept by the ha-ha
from trampling the lawn and mooing at the guests.

•

Your ha-ha, then, is a structure against your chaos.
And your story about Antonio's prosciutto
is thus a structure against your psychological chaos, as the poem

about the meal at Dal Pescatore and the hideously inappropriate memory
and Antonio's prosciutto and the ha-ha
is a further structure against further chaos still.

Or not structure, maybe, but process, like a walk.
There's almost no problem a walk can't solve,
say the walkers, and surely the same is true about poetry and possibly

doubly true when the poem is about walking, as is Campbell McGrath's
"Spring Comes to Chicago," in which
the poet talks about walking around that city with his pregnant wife,

eating pizza in one restaurant and waffles in another and somehow surviving
the Chicago traffic that many do not survive,
for the same walk that can be our best friend can be our worst enemy as well—

while it is indisputably good to go out walking, it is equally indisputable
that we may, in the course of our exercise,
be struck down or otherwise injured, be we in 20th-century Chicago

or 18th-century Durham, where the ha-ha boom waxed and then waned
after Lord Lambton tumbled into his,
climbed out cursing, and had it filled with coal-spoil.

•

When the meal is over, we take a taxi to Piadena and the train
from there to Mantova,
past these little towns, each with its own duomo, great or small,

that bursts from the pavement like Dante's Mount of Paradise,
and while none is so beautiful as the dome
of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence or so Gothic and spire-studded

as the Milan duomo that seems to be armed against the devil's legions
or as vast as that of St. Peter's in Rome,
the cathedral big enough to brag of its bigness by outlining

on its floor — plenty of opportunities to stumble there! — the plans
of the other, lesser cathedrals,
still, were we to get off the train and walk into one of these little churches,

we'd see it's been built like all the others, its interior looming larger
than its exterior suggests and its vault
painted in the manner of the night sky, because night

is the best time to talk to God, for if Satan and his boys are everywhere,
the rates are cheaper then,
and so we make our way down the aisle, the dark cut only

by candlelight, and figures shuffle in the shadows, though who they are,
we'll never know, and our steps are uncertain,
but over our heads, the sky blazes with promise, and the stars are spinning.

--David Kirby