Zampogna

First I lost my family’s language,
then its culture
and even the extended clan
somewhere in the center of America,
left with hyphenated food.
I remember going thru the brownstone
one last time
to store up all the childhood fantasies
scratched into the nooks.

I’m not sure why I stepped down
into the dark cellar,
my hand groping the damp wall.
The room felt raw.
What the hell could I be searching for?
I pulled the cord of the hanging bulb
and the light led my eyes to a corner
where a dusty bag lay still.
Zampogna was stitched on its cover
in washed-out colors.
Zampogna. What a strange sounding name!
I carried it upstairs like a swathed baby
and held it up to the natural light.

I took out my trusty Palm Pilot
and checked the dictionary
to unearth its meaning –
from the Greek,
a Sicilian instrument hewed
from the belly of a goat,
(perhaps an enchanted beast)
with two chanters extending down –
some distant Celtic cousin to the bagpipe!
The message ended
with its Sicilian name – cornamusa.

I imagined that its notes must have cascaded
down those island-mountain slopes,
melancholy music for i poveri,
filling in the cracks of homes,
scored in surrounding stone
and lost in tempo over generations.
I had some need to dig beneath
the hardened dirt of that cellar,
like a passionate archaeologist.
I slammed the front door shut
but wasn’t ready for the interstate,
so off to Kinko’s on Houston Street
to experience these mystifying melodies
on a rented PC, resurrected from
its chip and sound card,
replicating an ersatz replay
for modern ears.
It wasn’t satisfying though and I ran out
to the Tower of the sprawled out,
teeming Village and put on earphones
to sound out a more digitally correct
version of Bagpipes of the World.

To be honest, I had trouble fathoming the music,
yet the sound coyly echoed in my thoughts
that swept all the way
to the island of sun and winds.
This was a time to listen,
a time to reflect,
chi sacciu, maybe a time to travel
to the deepest pitches of its call
in the heat of summer.