ROSANNA WARREN is the author of one chapbook of poems (SNOW DAY, Palaemon Press, 1981), and four collections of poems: EACH LEAF SHINES SEPARATE (Norton, 1984), STAINED GLASS (Norton, 1993), DEPARTURE (Norton, 2003), and GHOST IN A RED HAT (Norton, 2011). FABLES OF THE SELF: STUDIES IN LYRIC POETRY, a book of literary criticism, appeared from Norton in 2008. She edited and contributed to THE ART OF TRANSLATION: VOICES FROM THE FIELD (Northeastern, 1989), and has edited three chapbooks of poetry by prisoners.
Rosanna Warren has won fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, ACLS, The Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Lila Wallace Readers’ Digest Fund, among others. STAINED GLASS won the Lamont Poetry Award from the Academy of American Poets. She has won the Witter Bynner Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Lavan Younger Poets’ Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and the Award of Merit in Poetry from The American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2004. She was a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1999 – 2005. She teaches Comparative Literature at Boston University.
The poems below: From GHOST IN A RED HAT: POEMS by Rosanna Warren. Copyright © 2011 by Rosanna Warren. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. (www.wwnorton.com)
—when she disappeared on the path ahead of me
I leaned against a twisted oak, all I saw was evening light where she had been:
gold dust light, where a moment before
and thirty-eight years before that
my substantial mother strode before me in straw hat, bathing suit,
and loose flapping shirt,
every summer afternoon, her knapsack light across her back,
her step, in sandals, firm on the stony path
as we returned from the beach
and I mulled small rebellions and observed the dwarfish cork trees
with their pocky bark, the wind-wrestled oaks with arms akimbo,
while shafts of sea-light stabbed down between the trunks.
There was something I wanted to say, at the age of twelve,
some question she hadn’t answered,
and yesterday, so clearly seeing her pace before me
it rose again to the tip of my tongue, and the mystery was
not that she walked there, ten years after her death,
but that she vanished, and let twilight take her place—
Ghost in a Red Hat
—these cabbages under full sail, these ancient walls
smothered in ivy and wisteria with its purple froth:
in my middle age and sensible girth
I remember
starving.
I didn’t know why.
I practiced being a ghost.
I was a girl, I thought
this was how one became
a woman. I lived in a village
in Italy, it was picturesque, I was not
picturesque. That was the project:
I gnawed stale bread, roamed vineyards and olive groves,
drew portraits of artichoke plants under twisted trees,
recited Petrarch and grew
so thin I was a dazzling
knifeblade in my new white pants.
The old grandmother quietly cursed in a corner.
Her family ignored her. They ignored me.
I recited more Petrarch and bought a broad-brimmed crimson straw hat.
What to do with this girl?
She learned to survive long spells of dryness.
She embraced strangers and they stayed strange.
She painted still lifes and they stayed still.
She dreamed she attended a soiree at a Soho loft
Where the main dish on a platter garnished with parsley
Was a woman’s naked torso, roasted, belly down, crisply hot.
She looked for the small flame guttering in a sacred jar.
Giving birth was one way. Holding a dying man’s hand was another.
She buried small animals, with appropriate rites, in the backyard.
And here are the generations: water and fire
begat turpentine which joined
earth and brought forth
color from mineral loins and boiled-down vegetable soul.
So steeped and soaked, this land where I live now,
so rushing in rain,
roof tiles bristle in moss, close-woven or feathery, sprigging with spores—
The cemetery teems: lichen, honeysuckle, roses.
Little mildewed photographs under glass.
Enemies make peace.
Centuries fall through limestone cracks.
And Edith came up the street this morning
to bring me Le Monde and La Revue des deux mondes
and a packet of fresh goat cheese
before setting out, in rain, on her drive to the Dordogne.
Poetry in this post: © Rosanna Warren
Photo: Joel E. Cohen
Published with the permission of Rosanna Warren and W.W. Norton & Company, Inc