Leandro X Rossi, 1910 – 1994
You said your name was Lee,
so I was Little Lee.
But when it came time to bury you,
there were no documents that bore
the one name I knew you by,
only the cracked, brown photocopy
of a birth certificate for baby
LAST NAME : Rossi___
FIRST NAME: _Leandro
MIDDLE : ___ x___
Once you left home,
a 12-year-old migrant
with two hundred in your shoe,
a going away present from
il tuo padre, Leandro,
you were an impostor,
X the unknown,
offering an alias to an unforgiving world.
The year was 1923,
a good year for a Dago boy
to leave the South –
your blue eyes and field-darkened skin
read like a wanted poster
to every cracker sheriff
between Memphis and Chicago.
You never lost your watchfulness,
never regained the knack of easy
friendship, never relaxed
without the help of beer or whiskey.
Your drinking buddies at the Legion
could only help with drinking,
not with loneliness
or the sense that you had committed
some crime, which even after
your law-abiding, small-business-
building, child-rearing, God-fearing
life, would follow you to the grave.
Lee Rossi’s most recent book is Wheelchair Samurai. His poems, reviews and interviews have appeared in The Sun, The Harvard Review, Poetry Northwest, The Beloit Poetry Journal, and The Southern Poetry Review. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.