Definitely A Rialto Moment

Not the piano or operatic fortissimo,
the keys on my mom's old black piano
still in the family, its back to the morning desert sun
in my house, cluttered with books and sandy dust
falling from my fingers and music
crashing
shut
and turning inward, the way seasonal rivers do,
blame it on the local geography, I suppose,
everyone knows there is simply no water
in those vast washes,
only the occasional tempo of flood.

It was just a few days into my lessons
that my father banished me from playing.
no more more of that goddamned noise!
And the music stopped. It was deep summer,
after all, what could I expect. Music,
almost as unattainable as the sea,
never mind that our town was named
for a great tradition of song and character,
an ocean and a continent away.

I retreated to my room,
the grapefruit tree sagging with fruit that none of us
knows how to identify or eat,
the Santa Ana winds scrape the smog from our
scary-big instant mountains away,
my 55 year old grandma has just died,
bottles of her vodka
still turning up in our cupboards, she was too poor
for insurance or morphine to ease the cancer pain.

Meanwhile, my brothers played loud guitars
confirming their destination for rock star fame,
a little twist to come, in a few short years
after we moved to the desert,
the piano to be relegated to a lava rock rec room
unable to be played, its black facade more
decorative than of any particular use,
and feeling even more unloved
in the blank Mojave, its hopes for opera star productions
all but vanquished to the wind and sand.

But the summer my piano lessons were stopped
we're still living on Madrona Street
and the neighborhood kids are thugs
who throw eggs at our house
because my dad yells at them
to shut the fuck up, go home, quit hanging out
in the streets. This was supposed to be better
than McKinley Street, a little farther south,

where the eucalyptus trees on Riverside Avenue
pretend to render downtown pretty,
as if great Italian operas were to be unfurled
from behind red velvet curtains, centuries
of motif and pianissimo bursting forth

the way the water crashes down Lytle Creek
and floods the so called in-land,
and it's 30 years now
since I got that obscene phone call
from someone I always thought
was my junior high biology teacher,
made it a little hard to dissect frogs
with him smiling from behind his desk

and my father now has retired
from his electrical engineering job
and has developed a late life love
for the study of the Italian language,
and for the country of Italy itself,
though he has yet to see an opera

Definitely a Rialto moment, lemons from
the trees I watered smashed in the street,
I still remember their sting and stare
wondering why I'd watered and betrayed,
not knowing I had three brothers
who had fat tire bikes and guitars

The place has stayed the same,
just with new names and aching for a paint job:
on a summer drive, pointing things out
to my ho-hum daughter
who goes to a private school in Rancho Mirage

here's the old hardware store,
now it says "Rialto Meat Market."
here's the same old McDonald's on Route 66
where my mom would send us on our bikes
for hamburgers, 5 for $1 and a big bag of fries
here's the Rialto Women's Club, "since 1910,"
here's the old Protestant Church, its shingles
dripping on a guy sitting on its steps
here's the old liquor store, where we bought
penny candy and snow cones, where my dad
bought Ballantine Beer in cans,
and my old elementary school,
and the house where the hippie kids
OD'd and had an ambulance called,
here's the old house, the trees I watered faithfully
cut down, the grass long dried up and gone
here's our family church, a touch of Italian
Catholicism in a font of used tire stores,
tired gas stations, a mishmash of unwindowed bars,
empty buildings on weed-stricken asphalt parking lots
It's as if St. Catherine of Sienna remains center
of my memories, its faux-architecture template
of dry fountains and stucco angel statues
praying for an end to the drought,
visions of holy water hallucinated, becoming real

the way the river materialized overnight to become
the floods of '69 and made its rock grinding sounds
unnamed river, just a temporary sand blaster
cutting up all the roads, and using a dry wash
to master its ancient song, maybe not from
behind curtains, or with the white and black keys
of my mother's piano, it was incredibly strong

and made a lasting impression,
the way the Virgin Mary statue
at St. Catherine's church has remained
blue in face and robe
the way the stumps of what used to be
lovely city planted sycamore and elm trees
line the old parts of town, where we lived,
everything has been cut down,
and lawns remain unwatered
although I left them as pure as could be
in my memory, a little less than thundering songs

c. 2008 Ruth Nolan