Two excerpts from “MARMORE”

A river that roars and falls over big rocks

& mounts in spray the skies

How it felt to drink the air
after the hell of concrete idling

like all tourists
like Turner & Shelley
tasting the sublime

or Byron whose Velino cleaves
the wave worn precipice pitiless horror
stopped timely by the sluice gates

We wait in the bus
for Luciano to finish his gelato

∆

We drink in the evenings

amaro w/ a picture of the Calabrian coast
as close to the sea as we’ll come here
where water is moved not moving

In the mornings
I piece stories together

Edmund tells one about a Roman
engineer who miscalculated the aqueduct’s slope
so the bridge broke away from itself midair

We like this story not because we relish tragedy—
the engineer cannot live, of course—
so much as we need to be reassured of the precarity
of every space that empire makes & fills

Monuments, yes, but also plumbing & control channels
Things but also the relation between things

I walk the perimeter
of the olive grove
steeper than warned

In the wet heat
stories expand

A valley hemmed by two rivers compelled by flow rate
My father w/ the power to move water
whose presence is a compressor’s vibration rising
from the garage below my bedroom
at end of the last century

I watch the steel mill a long time

until I feel the rumble of haul trucks
in my belly the factory’s hum & my pulse
a long note connecting
this basin to my own

At first it was strategic—
location far from the borders & the sea
uninterrupted source of hydraulic
power easy to protect in war
steel plates for ironclads artillery
shrapnel shells constructed
at piece rates & moved to Rome
by rail      workers kept far
from Mussolini’s capital

But then seas & borders
look different from above
than from below

I wash sweaty t-shirts
underwear w/ the hand pump
Know I’ll be asked about
depth & pressure will not answer

The math is always changing
but there’s a red thread an artery
linking these privatized hills
to the crane erecting condos
in Toronto elevator in the Holiday Inn
off highway 40 in Oklahoma
rivet on a guard rail near the Port of Los Angeles

Wherever I am I feel mostly noise
pile drivers aspiration from the blast furnace
small doubts dangle above our beds
bodies shift in a room beside
a tap opens down the hall

the rush of falling water

∆

Note: Descriptions of the Marmore waterfall in italicized text are drawn from Virgil’s The Aeneid and Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.

Claire Farley is a poet, editor, and literary critic from Québec currently living in Los Angeles. She is a founder of the intersectional feminist magazine Canthius and her writing has been published in Arc Poetry Magazine, The Ex-Puritan, and Canadian Literature. Her first chapbook is Bait & Switch (Anstruther Press, 2020).