F i c t i o n - $8.00
The Fatherlands is a neo-classical gallery, Michael Trocchia the guide, showing us portraits, landscapes, sculptures, paintings, a collage of a time long past but as real and present as the space at the end of this period. In the background you will hear an overture of whispers, where ancestors have shaped his art, and our vision of it.
Praise
for
The Fatherlands
“Someone might say that The Fatherlands is a rebuke, that it is a sort of anarchist screed. The book is certainly a vehement denouncement of the present state of affairs in American life, politics, and letters. But Trocchia is no coward, and he does not tear down without raising up.”
J e s s e B a l l , au t hor of S i l e n c e O n c e B e g u n a n d T h e C u r f e w “The Fatherlands is beautiful, its narrative threads graceful and lithe.”
JA T y l e r , author of T h e Z o o ,
a
Going
“The Fatherlands is not an easy book to categorize . . . it is a witty, evocative, and perceptive meditation on the ties—sometimes deep, sometimes accidental—that join persons to families, families to territories, territories to texts, and texts to literatures.”
R o b e r t V i s c u s i , a uthor of E l l i s I s l a n d and A s t o r i a
T he F atherlands
ISBN-10 098860779-4 ISBN-13 9780988607798 50800
9
780988 607798
m o n k e y p u z z l e p r e s s
.
c o m
Michael Trocchia
T he F atherlands Michael Trocchia
AD 2014
Monkey Puzzle Press Harrison, Arkansas
C o p y r i g h t Š 2 0 1 4 M ic h a el Troc c h ia
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief excerpts. Printed in the United States of America.
C over & I nt erior De s i g n Nate Jordon
C over A rt Sebastiano del Piombo, 1520 Image courtesy of Getty’s Open Content Program
ISBN-10: 0-9915429-0-8 ISBN-13: 978-0-9915429-0-1
Monkey Puzzle Press 424 N. Spring St. Harrison, Arkansas 72601 monkeypuzzlepress.com
For
the men and women
from whom
I
descend
. . . from the nefarious state of the outlaw world some few of the sturdiest first withdrew and established families, with whom and by whom they brought the fields under cultivation; and a long while later the many others also withdrew and took refuge on the lands cultivated by these fathers. Giambattista Vico, The New Science
Then come, dear father. Arms around my neck: I’ll take you on my shoulders, no great weight. Whatever happens, both will face one danger, Find one safety. Virgil, The Aeneid
T he F atherlands
I There awakes a slight man with his hind legs kicking at the foot of a marble bust. It is the bust of a long ago morning, chiseled in the form of a deformed and feverish boy. The eyes are made of mist and prophecy and in them is reflected a father’s beasts of fancy, howling and pacing at their own discretion. The sun then loosens and breaks the good day open and the bust crumbles to a pinch of sand. A woman walking by in a peculiar fashion scoops and pockets it for a later time, a time when the hours themselves will be melted down for the glass of a transparent death. The man crawls after her, seeking a match, one to strike against the sleight of his own hand.
1
Michael Trocchia
II Just before nightfall in the square, a boy empties his pockets: a silver ring, a paper gun, the blackest of lint, and a palmsized manual on the art of forgery. He flips to a back page filled with his father’s name, finding the signature copied out in various approximations. Out loud, he begins reading down the page, over and over enunciating the name of his father in voices as varied and false as those signed. At the far end of the street a woman sits between two lamp-posts, listening to the boy’s utterances mingle with the moans of a sick man in an unlit window above. In a minute, the doors to each home and shop will lock and the echoes will fill the square, ceasing only if the eyes of this boy and this woman themselves lock within the bewitchment of both.
2
T he F atherlands
III “This was once the house of my father,” says the man. She stands there barefoot and thinking of things not far enough away. “Come in,” she indicates with a nod, “only for a moment,” adding in a language he once studied. Across the kitchen table, he slides a photograph. It is of a young boy, no more than nine, standing with his bicycle, his arm in a sling, a toy pipe in his mouth. “And these others around him?” she asks, feigning an interest. “His brothers, none of which survived.” He turns toward the head of the table, where bread soaks in the cloudy water of a glass bowl. There are ants in the far corner of the room, a pile of dishtowels on the floor. When he turns back, nothing but her outline remains in the chair. He then hears her moving about the house, muttering in a language all her own that she has resigned herself to many things. He decides he will go down to the basement in search of a hammer, for the shadows have come loose from the floorboards and he will spend the rest of the hour nailing them back into place.
3
Michael Trocchia
IV On a ledge overlooking the neighboring town’s river, a man sits strumming a mandolin. He is bare-chested and wearing a skullcap, as is his usual dress at this hour. From below, a soft woman designs an episode composed of light, stage blood, and the vocal chords of a country pig. “It’s been stabbed in the throat!” she yells up at the man, referring not to the pig but to the wooden boy she carries in her arms. To the man, this could only be for the good—for all dolls, whether wooden or of some other substance, serve only to perpetuate the deterministic philosophies for which he himself once argued. For the woman, this alone was reason to weep, yet on this day it is the doll’s fate which saddens her and makes for high tragedy. The doll’s face resembles none other than the hardened face of their own boy, who, in an episode along the river, pushed himself from an old bridge that connects one kind of pain to another.
4
Notes The Vico epigraph is taken from the 70th entry in the section entitled “Elements” of Book I of his New Science, as it appears in Bergin and Fisch’s unabridged translation of the Third Edition (1744). The Virgil epigraph is taken from Book II of Robert Fitzgerald’s translation of The Aeneid. The 12th passage from The Fatherlands was written after a look at Felice Casorati’s painting Ragazza Con Scoldella (1920). The 27th passage from The Fatherlands was written after a look at Richard Müller’s illustration Meditation (1900). “Into the mouth of the wolf” is an Italian expression, roughly meaning “good luck.”
Acknowledgments Grateful acknowledgement is made to the editors of Tarpaulin Sky and Prick of the Spindle, in which sections of The Fatherlands first appeared.
About the Author
Michael Trocchia Š Paul Somers
Michael Trocchia grew up on Long Island and currently resides in Staunton, Virginia. His poems and prose have appeared in journals such as Mid-American Review, Camera Obscura Journal, Asheville Poetry Review, Open Letters Monthly, Tar River Poetry, and Prick of the Spindle. He was a finalist for the 2013 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize.
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F i c t i o n - $8.00
The Fatherlands is a neo-classical gallery, Michael Trocchia the guide, showing us portraits, landscapes, sculptures, paintings, a collage of a time long past but as real and present as the space at the end of this period. In the background you will hear an overture of whispers, where ancestors have shaped his art, and our vision of it.
Praise
for
The Fatherlands
“Someone might say that The Fatherlands is a rebuke, that it is a sort of anarchist screed. The book is certainly a vehement denouncement of the present state of affairs in American life, politics, and letters. But Trocchia is no coward, and he does not tear down without raising up.”
J e s s e B a l l , au t hor of S i l e n c e O n c e B e g u n a n d T h e C u r f e w “The Fatherlands is beautiful, its narrative threads graceful and lithe.”
JA T y l e r , author of T h e Z o o ,
a
Going
“The Fatherlands is not an easy book to categorize . . . it is a witty, evocative, and perceptive meditation on the ties—sometimes deep, sometimes accidental—that join persons to families, families to territories, territories to texts, and texts to literatures.”
R o b e r t V i s c u s i , a uthor of E l l i s I s l a n d and A s t o r i a
T he F atherlands
ISBN-10 098860779-4 ISBN-13 9780988607798 50800
9
780988 607798
m o n k e y p u z z l e p r e s s
.
c o m
Michael Trocchia