Salvatore Buttaci

                 ARCHIMEDES IN HIS WOODEN TUB, WORKING ON HIS FAMOUS PRINCIPLE No book about Sicilians would be complete without mention of  Sicily's favorite son Archimedes. However, not content with simply mentioning that renowned mathematician, engineer, and physicist, as the author of  A Family of Sicilians…I tracked him down by spending the better part of 1997 running search ads in both Greek and Sicilian newspapers and then hiring a missing-persons detective from Siracusa, Sicily, by the name of  Eduardo Morro. No one responded to the ads except an impostor named Archimopolis, proprietor of The Lazy Z_ta Diner in downtown Athens. And as for the Siclian missing-persons detective, he was found months later feeblemindedly wandering the streets of Messina, babbling that he himself was the great Archimedes!    As luck would have it, an anonymous e-mail I was sent contained Archimedes' URL!  The genius had figured a way onto the Worldwide Web where he was teaching calculus to bedridden octagenarians who'd never made it to senior year of high school. From the Elysian Fields where he  had been resting since his death in 212 B.C., Archimedes was again in his glory. Here is the Archimedes interview I conducted with him via the Net during the month of June 1998.   Q:    A Greek in a book of Sicilians?   A:     My father––Phidias by name––was Greek. I was born in Sicily. In Siracusa. Long before the Arabs, the Normans, and even before the...

    Painting by Auguste Renoir, 1876     Poem by Salvatore Buttaci, 1994 This is not the veil I had hoped to wear. You can take that for the God-honest truth! This one is black; the other was white. This is today: a time for mourning. That was long ago. How do you explain a life? Mine, that is. One summer the earth revolved  around the two of us. We were in love. Together for the first time we sat on St. Honore's Hill and timed the sun that rose at early dawn. At night we scanned the black sky and from a galaxy of star lights we chose a star for ourselves, wished upon it almost nightly.   That was then: a time for dreaming. Today on this cold November day I wear the black veil that tells the world for me this is a time of mourning: one last loved one gone; one last wrenching of the heart. I no longer sit and watch the sun set, nor do I look up to find again  that long-ago star lost somewhere in the heavens. That was long ago; this is now.   At the mirror this morning before I left the empty house  for Papa's funeral I looked at myself in this veil, counted the black dots like end marks closing all the episodes of my life and thought:  If only I could hide forever! If only I could wear this veil  and behind it live my tears and...

STEMS OF WHITE PEONIES AND PRUNING SHEARS Painting by Edouard Manet (1864) Poem by Salvatore Buttaci (1994)   We play the game sometimes of divining the alter egos of your garden flowers: What they resembled on their tall green stems, what they might have been if only they could have decided for themselves in the pre-garden before they were seeds, when God in the waiting place held fragilely to the thought of what they would become.   Yesterday you laid two white peonies on the worktable and called me from an afternoon nap, saying "You first! Tell me what you see!" Groggy from interrupted sleep, but always pleased to please you. I study the two peonies, the black pruning shears, while you stand, arms folded,  impatient.   "It seems to me," I begin, then pause long enough to tease you. "It seems to me," I begin again, "two lambs have taken to their pasture sleep, where we come upon them resting atop summer mounds of grass.   They face each other for comfort, for safety's sake, or perhaps to reap direct rays of sunlight. Yes, I see two lambs."   "And the shears?  What about the shears?" you want to know. "What are they?  What would they have been had they not been pruning shears?"   "They are not pruning shears today," I tell you, smilingly. "While the lambs count people leaping over tall fences, while the lambs ease into  a quiet peaceful sleep, the herdsman comes with sharp clippers...

                                   BERTHE MORISOT                      Painting by Edouard Manet (1873)                      Poem by Salvatore Buttaci  (1994) "Too  much yellow!" I tell the painter. "You've made me out to appear  some pasty-looking, half-dead matron who has never seen the sun! Devotees of art one day  will stand before this canvas and wonder: 'Did Madame Morisot have a heart of wax to match the sallowness of her face?'"   Where will I be then to defend myself? Long dead, no doubt, somewhere in the other world where the shade of one's complexion will certainly not be the local gossip, nor a discussion tète à tète  about the worthiness of Manet's work.   So all I mean to say I shall say now: Blame Manet! Blame the early afternoon light that he insisted shine through the open doors on to my face. Blame the paucity of his palette: The paucity of his palette... I do like that. A line for a poem one day.   Did I tell you I am a poetess and a painter? Oh, yes! All the more reason I am upset. A poetess is filled with life: A painter creates life, still and otherwise. the rosiness pats her face like a kind of rose. Her eyes glitter as though God wished they be stars and they...

          VAMPIRE AND SKULL (Public Domain)                                                  College Freshman, age 22    First of all, I bummed around a lot before deciding to go to college. Even though I enjoyed tinkering with cars, I listened to my father who kept telling me I was a bum, that I needed to get a college education if I wanted to amount to anything. As if that wasn't enough, I met this girl named Sadie, who started in on me, too. "You want to marry me," she said, "better go to college so you can earn big bucks someday and amount to something." Here I am at twenty-two, trying to fit in with students right out of high school, all of them seeming to be much brighter than I am. Tests, projects, homework--it all came down on me like a ton of bricks. Today I decided was my last day of college. That's it. I've had it beating myself silly, hitting the books, and getting nothing back in return. Walking a different route home--I figured I'd break the monotony of my life in every way--I saw your sign outside: BLOOD IS THICKER THAN WATER--and decided to stop and buy an admission ticket. A good vampire play is just what I need. All the pressures of my life have been kind of like vampires wanting blood, sucking...