She handed me my peasant costume colouring book
and watched me fill the woman's bodice in with black,
her bell-shaped skirt in blue and yellow stripes,
the shepherd's jerkin and his britches in a doggy brown.
She leaned her shoulder into mine and filled the woman's
lips in red and gave the man a massive green moustache.
I saw how fine my mother's ankles were in their sheer stockings,
her supple hand-made moccasins, the bright numerals
of her small black-faced wristwatch, inhaled the lemon smell
of her cologne, revered her double rope of pearls,
her accoutrements of calf-skin, tweed and tortoiseshell –
her strike against the disappointments of her life.
I walked up to the counter. The waitress pointed to a door
that led down into the cellar, dark, wonderfully cool
and smelling of the earth, filled with boxes of tomatoes,
and a yard like the bottom of a well and at its end,
the toilet with a tiny glassless window high up on the wall.
I sat down and saw a mountain magnified against the sky.
She never told me why we stayed there for so long.
Were we hiding from something or someone?
She was the favourite with all the shopkeepers.
Every week she'd have her hair done. It was too hot
for me to leave our pensione. Most days she lay in bed,
looking at photos of Mastroianni and Lollobrigida.