My sweet “little” cousin — she was six years my junior — has been gone for a year and a week, and she’s been on my mind.

I always thought of her as the tag-along kid, a gentle, exuberant spirit with a huge laugh who glided behind or beside us on gossamer slippers, drinking us in, imbibing our heartbeats but never seeking to judge, only to know our rhythms in order to synchronize hers. . . .

She wrote poetry, sometimes in English, sometimes in Italian . . . .

What the eyes take in
The heart cannot contain
In contemplation and wonder,
The landscape unfolds
Changes breathes lives
Choruses of wind and sun
clouds and birds
Welcome bless and dance

Colore vibrante sonoro d’autonno
Il Ginkgo
Solare

Vive l’intensità del suo essere
Una manifestazione delle potenzialità innate
Un seme che porta l’energia dell’espressione
Color parlante entenso
Improvviso concerto d’autunno.

We miss her.  She lived in Italy in her last years, and I didn’t see her often enough, and when I did see her, she was in the bosom of a family hungry for her presence, so there was never enough time to just be.  And yet she is all around me. . . .

I wrote this the day after she died, and I am placing it here as my tribute to her dynamic anima, to her abiding love, to her immortality.

To Adriana

The email said you’d gone,

But I know better.

You’re still here.  I know you are.

I sense your presence even in this city,

My city, whose weight you long since left behind.

I feel you in the cooler breezes blowing in off the North Atlantic

Tickling my nose, making me sneeze,

Delighting me with reassurance

This awful summer’s nearly done, and

Joy of autumn color’s  close at hand.

I smell your perfumes in the fragrant salt sea air

That drifts through my window when the city rests,

When the churning gases of industry belch a little less,

And the noxious poverty covers itself with the darkness

That spreads like healing balm around us.

And also in the vanilla-honeyed sweetness of roasting peanuts

At curbside pretzel stands.

I hear your laughter among the children playing hopscotch

Riding scooters past my café table

Where I’ve come to write a remembrance of you.

And there you are singing – Puccini, then Verdi and Bizet—in my IPOD buds.

Now I hear you once again in the murmur

Of voices from beyond.  A murmur I only occasionally notice

But one you heard, distinctly, long before any of us

Knew they were there.

I taste the memory of you, of the meals we cooked in Eugene on

That saffron soft sweet savory day we escaped another summer’s brutal heat

And cavorted on the beach

Knowing even then how fleetingly we flew.

Tears of adolescence long since dried,

We reveled in our abundance of joy.

See what I mean?

The email said you’d gone, but you are everywhere around me.

Vibrant in color, light and sound,

As you were but different, freer,

Moving nimbly, lightly past the pleasure and the pain.

You always seemed as light as air to me,

Moving with the grace of one propelled by spirits

And by a joy from somewhere else.

I see you dancing, always dancing

In the sparkling , gentle brownness of my Abigail’s eyes.

You dance divinely, I tell you, and you smile

So patiently at my pedestrian observation.

You smile on, knowing what we all know . . .

Or will . . . soon enough.