When I was three, my father tells me,

and we lived with the gods in Roma,

he gave me a soccer ball of blue and yellow.

(I can show you the ball in a photo.)

Very many of the summer evenings,

we walked to Piazza Navona,

and my father sat in his chair at La Compana,

behind the railing draped in red cotton.

He would watch me practice among the easels,

beside the sweaty guitarists, the printsellers.

One evening my ball bounced into the fontana,

into the liquid republic of Neptune himself.

I stopped. Why, I do not know. Entranced, certainly,

because I see the ball to behave so strangely,

not bouncing, as on the cobblestones.

No, on the surface of this Baroque sea

it quakes and dances, revolving,

shivering up and down without moving,

rocking back and forth in the applauding water.

Then, I see very many of the statues are also moving.

(This I have never told my father.)

Also, I hear sea-horses braying,

and watch three-year-old angels wrestling dolphins,

and I jerk my head when a triton whistles me out of bounds.

The gods do not play very good soccer, I am thinking,

but the ball is itself so alive, vibrating.

My father was watching me carefully

until the ball came close to the edge of the fontana,

then he came over to lean across and fetch it.

Of course, I threw it right back into the water,

daring the triton to teach me his secret.

​

Published in Italian Americana (winter, 2008)