Robert Wrigley
Cima di Cocuzzo聽
聽 聽 聽 聽 聽 Belvedere dei Faraglioni, Capri
Even considering their tininess, I would still kiss
every pink petal in this clutch of wildflowers.
It鈥檚 a pink that explains the cosmetics
industry, as does the scent of such flowers,
these with a smell so evanescent it cannot be
detected among fewer than a million blooms,
a threshold we have met today, apparently.
For look at how bees bumble room to room
in a full-blown mania for fructification,
bringing gold and powerful bee black footfalls
into the buzz-moan bob and sway of pollination:
stigma and stile and deep plunder anther of all鈥�
and me on my belly working around each bee,
each bee bellying up to a blossom, ignoring me.
The simplest translation of 鈥淐ima di Cocuzzo鈥� means 鈥渢op of the hill.鈥� Except this hill is a craggy mountain of limestone on the southern shore of the isle of Capri. It rises almost vertically from the otherworldly blue of the Tyrrhenian Sea. In fact, Cocuzzo is a sub-peak along a ridge extending down from the very top of the island itself, Monte Solaro. Kim and I had arrived on Capri on March 13, 2023. We were staying for nine weeks in Anacapri, the vastly less touristed upper town. We were there to write but also to live for a while, on Capri.
At the beginning of our second week, a common American atrocity reached out and grabbed us: another school shooting, this time in Nashville. From the moment that news arrived on our phones and computers, everything I wrote kept coming back to the shooting, or the shootings, or the unending list of shootings. I wondered sometimes what the Anacaprese thought about us; Americans, that is, from the place where school shootings were invented and now seemed to happen all the time. (It terrifies me to say so, but there has never been a school shooting in Italy.)
But nine weeks on Capri, one of the most beautiful places on the planet. I wrote a lot, but not much that is likely to have much of a half-life. Except maybe this little poem. It was the one piece I wrote there that didn鈥檛 loop back onto the misery of my heartbroken obsession. It would have been early May, spring wildflowers everywhere along the slopes of Cima di Cocuzzo鈥攕weet, blessed poppy fields of a sort, a distraction at least, a way of being absolutely there for a few minutes, in that spectacular place I would have to leave soon, and go back home, where I did not wish to go.
has won numerous awards for his work, including the Kingsley Tufts Award, the San Francisco Poetry Center Book Award, and a Pacific聽 Northwest Book Award. He lives in the woods of Idaho with his wife, the writer聽 Kim Barnes. Wrigley鈥檚 latest book, The True Account of Myself As a Bird, is his聽 twelfth collection of poems. He is also the author of a collection of personal聽 essays, mostly about poetry, called Nemerov鈥檚 Door.