On the Road, Touch and Go, with D. H. Lawrence

American Poetry Review, The, Jul/Aug 2005 by Rudman, Mark

"There are blows in life, so powerful . . . I don't know!"

-César Vallejo, trans. Clayton Eshleman

I DIDN'T WANT TO, BUT FOR REASONS THAT will become abundantly clear, I'm forced to begin at the beginning, at the sources that gave rise to this writing. In the summer following my mother's death, with my son for the first time, at the age of sixteen, safely stowed in a summer camp, my wife and I headed to Italy for a breather. Other losses had also occurred. At some point, we were staying in Lazio to be within proximity of both Rome and several Etruscan sites. I began to feel a thickness in my lungs building up. Cats in the courtyard? Except for one respiratory flu in my mid-twenties, I hadn't had an asthma attack since I was eleven when we moved from Illinois to Utah, and I lingered-and malingered-in the West long enough, as they say, to outgrow it. Outgrow it, but not without fear of its reoccurrence. Everyone has a defining fear having to do with their own mortality, usually connected to childhood illness, and mine is suffocation: not getting enough air in my lungs. After Lazio we headed into the Abruzzi, to a town called Abateggio, as far as possible from "culture" and where the most wonderful dishes were made from rabbits and boars and could be had for less than it cost to eat at the local Cuban-Chinese restaurant in New York City. Pretty soon I would be out hunting rabbits with a bow and arrow like figures in a painting by Paolo Uccello. As night came on, my voice lowered several octaves, my lungs began to thicken, my breathing grew heavy. What could it be? What could have followed me from Lazio to Abateggio?

I feel imperiled by the heat and the toxic smoke from the cement factory in Scafa, yet too restless and curious to imitate the lizard's stillness. The heat of the day is trapped in the valley of Scafa. Turns the port of Pescara into a dead zone. I found the following passage in Lawrence's novel The Lost Girl on November 4, 2004: "It seems that there are places which resist us, which have the power to overthrow our psychic being. It seems as if every country has its potent negative centers, localities which savagely and triumphantly refuse our living culture. And Alvinia had struck one of them, here on the edge of the Abruzzi."

The light pattern in the scattered villages reaching from these mountain heights to Pescara, is reminiscent of what it looks like from the hills in miniature, above Los Angeles, Salt Lake City, or Albuquerque; the distance between sustained bands of segments, the abrupt break off into hilly darkness, the disbanding of illumination, is as much an impression, a healing vapor.

And the mystery of the scattered zigzag ablaze in the night is resolved, if not solved, in the twilight: it was like a runway to Pescara, like an unlit pinball machine.

The heat trapped in the Apennines. The refracted possibility that the scarce coolness from the snow-covered peaks will blow over and down. The heat made twilight come early in the Abruzzi one night. The young woman who runs the herboristica in Scafa was tugging on her tee shirt to emphasize the heat. She was amused at my requests for multiple products containing green tea, and when I commented on its proximity to eucalyptus she said she'd been thirteen times to Australia to visit her brother, a professional soccer player, who lived there with his Australian wife, and handed me a koala with an Australian flag. When she learned why I was so avid about green tea, she told me of a secret place "where the mothers take their babies to breathe the vapors."

Where will this lead lead?

No one around, except history. Plaques that inform how this river has provided hydraulic power for five-hundred years. I wade into turquoise shallows. Softer than belief, they grab my feet. And now with quicksand between my ankles and knees I grip a log. Test my weight, haul myself on like mounting a mule, edge onto my back, sit down. Safe, for the time being. It's an effort to maintain equilibrium: to stay on the log and have my ankles in the water at the same time, shoulders aching from the balancing act-left foot braced against solid, sensuous and mossy rock, right foot embraced by the milky sand.

I lie across the log and try to dip my head into the curative waters. To dip my head and not crack my skull. Impossible. And so to splash acqua fredda on my head I am forced to fill my baseball cap with this sulfurous water-murky and clear and way colder than the legendary waters that assail, jab and pound, Schoodic Point's imperious granite, far enough north on the Maine coast to know you're somewhere else, unfamiliar, and real.

One night in Pescara, we got the scuttlebutt from a pharmacist. (Pharmacists in Italy are often like what doctors used to be like in the U.S.A., serious, thoughtful, empathetic human beings.) "It is a late spring this year," he said. His daughter, a girl of thirteen, has been so choked up that they closed all the shutters of the house, and for days she couldn't leave because she couldn't breathe, and as far as he knew, she had no history of asthma or allergies. "It's the late spring," he said. "The trees are blooming in July when they ought to have bloomed in May, so the entire climate is altered." He recommended a new drug, a tawny allergy pill the size of a bullet. His main warning about taking it was: wait until night. (I did what he said, and it helped a bit, and when I later showed it to a pharmacist in the U.S.A. she recognized it as instantly as our mega advertised Allegra.) I sought other remedies, including cortisone shots which, once again, pharmacists can administer in emergencies in Italy, but this led to insomnia . . .