All Knowing
I’m embarrassed to ask, but has Venus always flown there in the dusk, west,
dragging its white fire down? Have the graduation tassels on mortarboard
always derived from the catkins in May on pecans and birches and oak?
Have the house finches always been red in the face? I’m ashamed to say
I didn’t know the bluebird would come back to the little hole in the nest box
only if I stripped the home of its bedding—wrapper, straw, twig, twig, cotton
from the milkweed. I didn’t know the word et cetera (from the Latin
for “and the other”) would be eccetera in Italian. Who knew that
after all the blood on swords and axes and lances, the Florentine flag
would change from a white lily on a red field to a red lily on a white shield?
The Guelph party or the Ghibellines. Has a burial always been called a hole
in one? I didn’t know that after my parents died I would remember them
for a thousand years, from the Dark Ages to the re-enchantment of medieval days
when I would pray for them on their birthdays, death days, saints’ days, name days
by lifting a glass of spirits to eye level, then having a sip of sprouting barley. I feel
as if I always knew that whiskey derived from the Irish for water of life. My father’s tongue.