Free Nothing by Design by Mary Jo Salter Page B

“giver of due regard”
        you prayed to Saint Lucy once. I rise
        before you, glass raised, to insist
        that regarding you was never hard,
    you for whom seeing is the keenest praise.

FROM A BALCONY, LAKE COMO
        1.
    Up close, last night’s beads of rain
    cling to the underside of the railing
    like berries to a vine.
        2.
    Is it still raining? How to be sure
    this morning, if not for the tall
    columnar cypress
    so many plummeting
    meters down, a solemn
    sentry standing at attention
    to everything that can’t be seen
    by the human eye? Only
    against such opacity
    can we discern the soundless
    drizzle, a mild
    disturbance like midges.
        3.
    A blur of terra cotta
    and ochre here and there:
    while I describe it,
        4.
    the village is clearing a little.
    Just below, a gardener’s
    broom of snapped branches
    scratches a surface,
    sidelines another heap of debris.
    On a rooftop (so far from us
    it’s a floor), a roofer
    plants his boots on the tiles,
    fixing the middle distance.
        5.
    From which the village climbs again,
    receding from
    the valley in switchbacks
    (we can tell because
    of that minuscule vehicle
    ducking in and out of trees)
    to scale the face of the first
    cloud-haloed
    mountain in a series
    of mountains, each slipped
    neatly behind the last:
    ever-flatter and -duller
    file folders of color,
    emerald to jade to a faded
    wafer of blue so watery
    it comes out of sumi-e.
    A Japanese- or Chinese-
    Italian scroll, a vertiginous
    landscape hung
    in the empty niche
    between the open French windows.
        6.
    When did the puddle
    of rain on the balcony
    chair disappear?
    I thought I was looking.
    Did it drip through the slats?
    Evaporate? What?
        7.
    Sun picks out
    the young olive trees
    positioned widely in a field
    with their new shadows,
    as if gawkily waiting
    to be tagged in a game.
    And on the lake, finally,
    all agitations, tremblings
    longed-for are visible:
    slubbed yellows, prismatic
    pinks like the costly
    shantungs of Como
    smoothed out on a counter,
    cupped again, crumpled,
    marveled at, lifted
    to light; set aside.
        8.
    Behind the brooding,
    regrouping humidity,
    lightning
    is assembling all our
    slate-blue, shifting
    late afternoons into one simple,
    zigzagged, single-minded line:
    not here yet, but
    coming on schedule
    like the ferry pushing
    off from Varenna,
    appointed to veer this way.

CONSTELLATIONS
    His parents want him to play less.
    Well then, they should have thought ahead—
    they knew the type of mind he had;
    Dad never should have taught him chess.
    But face it, Dad’s still limited
    at seeing long-term consequences.
    Dumb strategies, those lame defenses—
    it makes him sad, alone in bed
    on a Saturday night, beneath a quilt
    his mother calls a floral chessboard;
    at only five years old, he’d floored
    them both by beating him. (It’s guilt,
    not sadness, that he’s really feeling:
    he gets the picture faster than
    they’ll ever fathom.) Tonight again
    he looks up at his stickered ceiling
    for the vision of the infinite
    Grand Master. There, instead of glue-on,
    glow-in-the-dark stars, the view
    some guys make do with, he has eight
    squares by eight: a constellation
    of white on black, a sixty-four-
    tile universe, a dizzy dance floor
    on which his moves, some combination
    he thought of, might not have been seen
    once in the game’s unending annals.
    King-usurping gambits, channels
    around the wide skirts of the queen.
    He should be “thinking about dating,”
    his mother says. As if he isn’t!
    She seems to think he’s self-imprisoned
    here, that some brave girl is waiting
    to rescue him, like Rapunzel, from
    the castle. Of course he’s desperate
    to kiss them, to plunge into that sweet
    wet something: but thinking hard can summon
    even that sensation. It’s long
    since he has bothered clasping, lifting
    a piece: admittedly, the shifting
    of objects on a plane isn’t wrong,
    if you need that, but he’s in a