The next day in the office, I asked if I could make a quick trip to Rome for personal reasons. Francesca’s partner told me I’d have to take a couple of sick days, because I didn’t have any vacation days yet.

I enter my parents’ apartment and nod to my father in his easy chair, then I bend over and kiss him on the head, his white, fine hair tickling my beard. Emigrating makes you godlike—you can manipulate time, age your parents through montage, like a great director, transforming the continuity of life, the invisibility of time, into a series of portraits.

My father, deflated, arms thin, hairless; my mother, drowsy, weariness showing on her face, hair duller, frizzier; at one time, I think, it was completely straight: surprises, a combination of accelerated time and rediscoveries, paying closer attention.

She lets me kiss her on the temple and says: “You got some packages”—books still sent to their address, my packages from presses still come here, because living away from home, I’ve never had a doorman or a package room.

We go sit in the kitchen. Boiled vegetables and buffalo mozzarella for my father and me, my mother’s already had some: we only manage to eat with her on important occasions—she’s always “already eaten”—eating is shameful for her, like in that Buñuel movie where people have their meals hiding in the bathroom. She’s standing, tailbone against the counter, back to the window.

To write about my mother, I take ten drops of benzodiazepine in water—it’s the first time I’ve ever dared to write about her.

I’ve never described her, not here, not in any of my poems. She’s a tall woman, just under five foot ten, with my same build, a bit overweight, like me. Strong shoulders, strong legs, a belly, a proud expression: evasive, amazed, superior, sidelong. She has a messy pageboy cut. I don’t think she’s ever spent more than ten seconds brushing her hair, including when she was a girl: I don’t know if this is true, but my instinct says yes.

Once, seeing her on the sidewalk after Mass walking toward us, Barbara summed her up: “Here comes your mother—look how cute—a fur coat and a headband.” No one had ever summed up my mother, or helped me to understand her. An extremely intelligent child who has refused to become an adult, who only pretends to be a lady when she talks to electricians and plumbers, and only truly seems like an adult when she’s reflecting on religion and theology, which she studied in college after age fifty. She wears dark blue or turquoise flats, or moccasins. For a party, a ceremony: fine, loose-fitting slacks. In the winter she goes to church wearing a cape that billows as she walks. At home, her sweaters still smell like Mommy.