High Noon
Marc Alan Di Martino
Like an old-fashioned Sergio Leone spaghetti
western, my father as Clint Eastwood, toothpick
balanced on his lip, six-shooter strapped to his hip
five o’clock shadow eclipsing the lower hemisphere
of his jaw, eyes squinted against the harsh noon light
under a natty ten-gallon hat. Splitscreen, as usual.
A flock of encircling vultures cast gyrating shadows
on the sand, a clock’s warped hands. It’s showdown
time—but where is the Man in Black? He’s late again.
A sidewinder shoots past the saloon. Roll tumbleweeds.
At this point the reels are spliced. Director’s cut,
snipped and edited, urgent as the heart attack
that leveled him. Cut to the final scene of his life,
the hospital bed where I last embraced him.
Punctilious, the Man in Black showed up after all
with his dreadful band of thieves. My father,
no match for his tricks, fell at the first shot
fired. Tomato paste gushed from the wound
in his chest. The desert bloomed wild with its red.
Writer’s Notebook
“High Noon” undoubtedly had its genesis in my first book Unburial, which deals largely with my father’s death from sudden heart failure when I was fifteen. How did it take on the trappings of a Spaghetti Western film? Most likely because that genre is so identifiably Italian-American in the general psyche, and my father was a big Clint Eastwood fan. He had come to America during the heyday of the Spaghetti Western, and these landscapes were part of his cultural baggage as an Italian in late-1960s and 1970s America. (So I presume; we never had this conversation.)
Poetry starts with a line, an image, a phrase. You follow it where it leads. There is no direct link between the poem and the film High Noon. All is suggestion, aura, atmosphere. I am no better at explaining how I write my poems than anyone else is. It is the one place left for mysterious happenings.
about the writer
Marc Alan Di Martino is a Pushcart-nominated poet, translator and author of the collection Unburial (Kelsay, 2019). His work appears in Baltimore Review, Rattle, Rust + Moth, Tinderbox, Valparaiso Poetry Review and many other journals and anthologies. His second collection, Still Life with City, is forthcoming from Pski's Porch. He lives in Italy.