New Year's Eve, Praiano

A poem from the Amalfi Coast

December 31, 2023¹

Under a sky the color of fish scales
opalescent in the fishermen’s bucket
as they climb the cliff stairs,
two tails pink and thick as a mermaid’s
over the rim, silver shimmer fleeting 
under our eyes like the soft spangled sea
made flesh,

we pass the last day of the year.

We follow a trail of slender ceramic anchovies
down the walls, fleeing the gapes 
of tuna and curling arms of squid 
while madonnas watch piously 
from their tiles. 

Acorns under foot, cats around ankles,
lemon church bell counting the hours
inside the painted dome.

At the shore, the jumbled quiet 
of wintering boats, sea stench 
in the nose, lone fisherman rowing
a blue boat beyond the teal of cove,
no catch while we watch the sun 
spill veiled blessings on the shell-pale
walls of the cliff towns.

In the lemon church the priest 
lays the wafer on the tongues of believers.
We cook pasta on our borrowed stove.

Clouds sponge the last of the apricot
from the sea,
night falls,
and we wait for the turning,
trusting the dark held like a breath 
in the curve of coastline.

At last, the hour explodes into light 
and clanging church bell, color 
flowering all the way to Capri, 
bursting the undersides of clouds,
tracing the carve and perch of the people
at home among the rocks above the sea
under the sky that is not ours
but holds us all the same. 

And together we ask this hour
to mark our wondering bodies
and our hungry eyes.

---

Fireworks all the way to Capri

1. I feel like a bit of a sellout starting with such a postcard of a photo—actually of Positano, one of the ritzier towns on the Amalfi Coast, which we could see from our place in the more tucked-away Praiano, though I took that photo coming down from our hike on New Year’s Day along the ravishingly named Path of the Gods, Sentiero degli Dei, that skims along the top of the cliffs (we spent half the hike in clouds). The point is, our quiet New Year’s Eve in Praiano, one spent discovering a place as a home instead of a destination, will likely stay lodged deeper in my heart than the whirlwind of sightseeing that surrounded that little oasis in my family’s two-week Italy trip, fascinating and breathtaking as it all was.