The Echo of Bergamo
by Daniel Bachhuber
That boy with a basket on his back,
like an upturned ten-gallon hat.
He wears a perturbed, quizzical expression
as he consents to the camera and the Americans.
A single frame out of his whole life
enters the lens and dies on a piece of paper.
We were long enough in Bergamo
the town is in us,
and we are like upturned hats
filled by the echo on a stone street,
the smoke of moisture in a field.
We know the iron gate
that opens to the chamber orchestra
playing Mozart while rain
darkens the tree trunks.
We know the walk out of town,
the road like one more terrace,
only wider, and gray,
of the cultivated hillside
of the wine that sweetens
in the eye of the grape.