Italian Hand Gestures

 

Originally published by Dime Show Review (now defunct) in early 2017, my whimsical and wistful story "Italian Hand Gestures" has been reprinted now by Doubleback Review (Issue 7:2 - October 2025).

 

The story is (first) about a self-conscious stutterer's discovery of the liberating world of hand gestures to express everything he couldn't convey otherwise.

 

"He especially liked the gesture where the hand moved level over the top of the head, meaning drily, 'go jump in a lake.'  He learned to tilt his hand slightly to specify which lake he had in mind—the lazy length of Lake Como, smoky and blue with late summer bonfires burning tendrils of old grape vine; the gusty German holiday-making shores of Lake Garda with garish bursts of sails; the chilly mirror of a snow-fed lake in the Alps down from the St. Bernard Pass, where the great dogs are raised and archaeologists scour the bedrock for traces of a Roman temple to Jupiter.

         Within just a few weeks, freed as he was from the impediments and hesitations of regular speech, Sam got into the more difficult signs.  The one that cries out with daring insouciance 'bring me some octopus!'  The one that asks 'is the blue of your eyes what the Renaissance artists made from lapis lazuli and called azzuro oltramarino?'  And that gentle flutter of the left-hand fingers against the palm of the other, half-reaching hand, that recalls in a quiet singsong how the sun brushed the pink-throated yellow roses on the morning of your great-grandparents' wedding day before the vows, I, Albert, take you, Nora."

 

 

Image:  Photo by Nahid Hatami on Unsplash

 

The Great Beyond

An appropriate story for this time of the year, Halloween Eve—a story of a ghostly haunting in northern New Mexico, was published earlier this month in Grande Dame Literary Journal.

A spiteful poltergeist, the family matriarch as it happens, is troubling the chapel she loved to retreat to in life—the now ruinous chapel next to the magical Tower of the Riddles, an adobe observatory and place of riddling the skies, initially intended as a belltower for the religious structure just below it on the hill, though the cast iron mission bell purchased in Mexico by one of the daughters had been lost in transit and never replaced.

 

When a frequent visitor to the Las Trampas ranch "asked Reuben [once her science teacher] to explain about the riddles in the tower's name, one summer night when they were studying the rings of Saturn, spectral bands of ice and rock and dust, he'd looked up from the eyepiece of the telescope and after thinking for a moment quoted the Neruda lines which he'd been taken with.  (Neruda's love of the natural world matching his own).

'the darkness perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire, and flowers,
the overpowering night, the universe.'"

 

 

image:  New Mexico, photographer unknown

Translations

 

I'm reading blackberries, translating them to clafoutis.

It is the day after the day of translations, the letters 

and their combinations played like chesspieces 

across the indeterminable board, vast and extraordinary

as the famous piazza where life itself has often been

played out, between the great Basilica and the timeless cafés,

where erstwhile spies, or lovers lost or not yet happened on,

or in the old days Mozart, Byron, Casanova, men with 

one of those "ways with words," and in that sea of chairs

and little tables too contessas, students of art history, sopranos

all sit whiling away hours, watching others wait and watch, 

sip cioccolata in tazza, caffè del Doge, un calice di Champagne

—or a bottle in its entirety, translated in a sorcerous instant

to frosted silver, moonrise, glass.  One of the nocturnes 

of the magician of tones famous for eking light from night. 

 

 

 

image:  James Whistler, Nocturne:  Blue and Gold, St. Mark's, Venice

Greek Unorthodox

 

A fifth excerpt of my hypothetical Crete novel, Reading the Stones, has been published online by Scrawl Place (great name)—"part visitor’s guide, part travelogue, part literary journal.  It’s meant for readers who prefer Bashō to Lonely Planet."

 

This is another segment of Anna's story, called "Greek Orthodox," and follows "Octopus" (Lowestoft Chronicle, Spring 2019), "Blue Monkeys" (Belle Ombre, March 2019), "Naxos" (Mediterranean Poetry, 2019), and a stand-alone segment featuring the novel's other main character, Mar—"Green Flash" (Silver Stork, September 2019).

 

Yet another portion of the novel was rewritten for different characters, with a different focus, as the story "Without Trace," and published by Halfway Down the Stairs (Frontiers issue) in March 2022.

 

"Greek Orthodox" takes place in Chaniá, on the northwestern shore of Crete, mostly in the agora (buying a red mullet and bit of feta; other days fish soup, various types of pite, the time-honored Greek pies), and various churches.  Eighty-year-old Anna loving what's there ("colorful as all get-out, she’d be the first to agree"), and always, achingly, the man who's still vividly with her in memory; but longing for her old, familiar home ("my own small fiefdom") back in Philadelphia, where she becomes resolved to return.

 

"A sunbeam fell through a high, crossed window—meant, charged.  Half the time she wondered whether religion wasn’t all about aesthetics.  Like theatre, it involved putting on a good show, lest your audience quickly lose interest.  Her eye followed the commanding beam of light that cut across the dawdling arches straight and sure, like a theatre spot.  A spotlight was meant to highlight faces, the action at dramatic center stage where the whisper was happening.  But moving into it, she was aware only of gold.  A field of gold.  A sown field and a battlefield.  (She would have to start incorporating gold into her paintings, it had such a dazzling effect.)  The dizzy gold of bees of saints of all the wisdom of antiquity passed down through scholars’ hands, hushed and guarded as religion, forbidden as passion."

 

 

 

image:  View of Agia Aikaterini church, Chania old town, Wikimedia Commons

 

 

September Picnic at DeLaveaga

 

September Picnic at DeLaveaga

 

Observing our unendingly exhausted souls,

I'm grateful all the same to have our sink unclogged

(the plumber like a Scotsman we have come to know

who plants a kindergarten of baby redwoods, 

builds things, voice like a dram of finest single malt, 

Laphroig once shared beside the river 

all awash with city lights).  Grateful to have one more 

(if only one—an ache of absence at the other end) 

incredible rendition of that metamorphic play, after 

another evening's consultation with the trees

and cloths narrating light on the table of sturdy, 

reassuring wood.  Lustrous cotton woven in France, 

underlying our summer salads, generously layered cake.  

And maybe as I write owls are gathering there,

above the stilling town, the stone blue ocean 

a marginal note with maybe a little sailboat or two, 

guileless as children's drawings (a few peaky pencil lines, 

a daub of white), as nothing else is anymore.  

Making a grocery list before we go:  "something like

twenty shrimp," fresh mint (which I somehow forget), 

feta, tomatoes still holding summer in them—

tasting of Greece, of the island we visited

where a long ago favorite book was set, about 

a kind of Prospero manipulating love and loss.  

Things we're all facing now, so I have my heart set

on that shrimp with summer tomatoes and oregano, 

another hour or two there among the watching trees, 

before the summer and the rest of it comes to an end.

image:  Christie Cochrell

 

Writing Spaces

 

image:  Christie Cochrell, Santa Fe

Journeys by Water

 

Later this week (after a journey by air) I'll take a harbor cruise on Lake Superior, a place I've never been before, though I've just learned that the lake water flows eventually and most circuitously into the St. Lawrence River, which I have seen and noted in Quebec, and that its name in Ojibwe is gitchi-gami, flowing in its turn into Longfellow's poem "The Song of Hiawatha" which I came across in school ages ago.

The flow of words takes me (circuitously too) back into letters and journals, which find me staying in "a green-roofed attic high above the St. Lawrence River in Vieux-Québec," seeing "the blue copper roofs above the St. Lawrence River in old Quebec," and reading The Cleaner of Chartres, "which sent me off on a quest after porc aux pruneaux—which morphed into chicken with prune and mustard sauce, which I'm making for tonight's dinner.  Next time it will be lamb tagine with prunes and apricots.  I first found prunes as an ingredient in meat dishes and pies in old Quebec City, as I was walking around checking menus, high above the St. Lawrence River."

In June 2012 I wrote "I do love being on the water.  One of my favorite ways of exploring a new place is to take a boat ride around it—whether an architecture river cruise in Chicago, a ferry to Tiburon or Sausalito with views of the Golden Gate Bridge and the diminished San Francisco skyline, a cruise on the slow green river below Durham Cathedral, a ferry from Boston down to Cape Cod, a kayak trip down the irrigation ditch in Kohala, a ride around the San Juan Islands or to Victoria, BC, a hydrofoil up Lago di Como or from Crete to Santorini, a rowboat on Wisconsin’s Bone Lake, or a paddlewheeler down the Mississippi from New Orleans."

 

And back in August 2009, just looking out at boats, "It’s good to be back in Chicago, one of my favorite big-cities-away-from-home (along with Boston’s Back Bay, midtown Manhattan, and Washington, DC up near the cathedral and zoo).  Despite the early hour, it’s pleasant to walk to work along the green river, under a lofty drawbridge, with architecture tour boats moored quietly along the opposite bank, impressive buildings rising all around.  To see the reflection of sky and clouds in a new hotel, on my way to the Corner Bakery for decaf espresso and croissants.  Then later in the day, sprung from the windowless, timeless exhibit hall, it’s reviving to see the play of fireboats and water taxis on their journeys to and from the lake, to sit with sandwich and notebook watching the wakes erasing as they go and the contemplative sparkle of sun.  And when the night comes on again the enchantment of lights reflected, multiplied, and with them unarticulated yearnings for things past or out of reach, the far places in me I long for and am always already leaving again."

 

And finally, further back and much farther away, sometime in the late 1980s, I noted the details of a journey by water among many in Greece, this from Santorini:  "There is room for only one boat to dock at the volcano, so the three or four that came after just tied up to the first and we disembarked by being handed across all the boats in turn—a bridge of boats.  After climbing we sailed around to the other side of the New Burned Island and went swimming off the boat, in thermal waters.  There was a small white church in the cove, and above it a cave with an outhouse in it overrun with goats."

 

All this especially luring, probably, because my birthplace was landlocked, and water so scarce there. Boat journeys came to seem the stuff of fairy tales.

 

 

image:  Henry Holiday, Sappho and Phaon

Ashmolean Museum, photo by Christie Cochrell