Red Gloves in Umbria

By Stephanie V Sears

In memory of gloves seen in Bergamo and of reading Vernon Lee

House in Umbria
On a November afternoon 
Scarred by an atrophied sun.

Neither castle nor farm,
But a pensive forehead framed
By gilded spirals of trance,  

Impervious to humdrum, 
Feeling with defiance
The ground shiver deep down.  

By stucco and stone
The Rocca has settled 
On the unstable font.

Rooms narrate frescos,
Vaultings macerate old terrors.
Cornelian urns, ebony cabinets

From four centuries past,
Fragile,  mortuary, 
Seem short of breath.

Handstitched, these gloves,
Scarlet and fuchsia kid skin,
Minutely sewn together.

Never meant to be worn,
A bloom, unknown to botany,
Flaunts its vain glory

On a console’s careful polish. 
There, the living reflect 
The immortal likeness of themselves.

Defined by elegance
With only itself as god,
None here practice time or theology.

Permanent dissent 
Orchestrates the senses
In a minor scale of exile.

Under the dank moon, a pool 
Like a goat’s malevolent eye,
Keeps out the countryside.

The tiered garden put up
Hedges inside where the gloves
Dress up statues as wraiths.

Wound up birds warble 
Elegies and fly across 
An exsanguinous sun.

 Through peristyles of fog 
Spreads the musky spell
Of a most wicked pair.

Stephanie V Sears is a French and American ethnologist (Doctorate EHESS, Paris 1993), free-lance journalist, essayist and poet whose poetry recently appeared in The Comstock Review,  The Dawn Treader,  Dodging the Rain,  Amethyst Review,  The Non-Conformist Magazine, SORTES, Red Ogre, The Headlight Review, pending in Neologism.  Short-listed in 2009 for a Pushcart Prize. Her first book of poetry: ‘The Strange Travels of Svinhilde Wilson’ was published by Adelaide Book in 2020.