Soranzio
Cinquecento
by Massimo Soranzio

End of summer on that deserted street
Between old factories and open fields ―
Factories closed now, fields no longer there ―
You taught me how to turn into second,
Not an easy task on a 500,
The original Fiat Five-Hundred,
Requiring a swift play of my right foot
From pedal to pedal, feeling the clutch,
Knowing when it would be ready for me
To push the gear stick into position
And go, enjoying the warm sun and air
From the folded-back rooftop, the same one
That wouldn’t keep the rain out in a storm,
No matter how tight you thought it was locked…

Neither of us knew it would be the last
Time ― I would never get another chance
To learn something from you, to be with you,
To share the joys and fears of growing up.

You did what a good father’s meant to do:
You did not leave before I could drive, too.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: My father taught me to drive about a year before he died, prematurely, aged 56. My driving lessons were great fun, because we were using my mother’s Fiat 500 R – the hard thing was passing from first to second gear, because you needed to perform a complex “dance” with your feet on the pedals, and at the same time “feel,” with your hand on the gear stick, when it was time to change: it was called “la doppietta,” which sounds more like Lewis Carroll’s wordgame, the doublet, than the actual English technical term, “double clutch.”

AUTHOR’S PHOTO CAPTION: I seem to have no picture of myself and the old Cinquecento, so here’s a picture of my father Rino, as a young man in the 1950s, with his old blue Fiat Topolino. He still had it when I was a little child in the early 60s, and it is the first family car I can remember.

soranzio1

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Massimo Soranzio writes on the northern Adriatic coast of Italy, about 20 miles from Trieste. He teaches English as a foreign language and English literature in a high school, and has been a journalist, a translator, and a freelance lecturer on Modernist literature and literary translation. He took part in the Found Poetry Review’s National Poetry Month challenges Oulipost (2014) and PoMoSco (2015), and in a virtual tour around the world with an international group of poets on foundpoetryfrontiers.org.