On one of Mazzaro’s gritty beaches
a cable car below Taormina,
I found a piece of Etna’s lava
the size of a goujon, a sinker,
a bobbin, smoothed only a little
by modest Mediterranean tides;
fetching five euros in the tourist shops but
unseen by the landlords of expensive
loungers and umbrellas, by Russian tourists,
Thai masseuses, Indian peddlers. No doubt
geologists could date it exactly
but I prefer the inexactitudes
of possibilities. Perhaps it was spewed
when the city walls of Catania
diverted the flow into the harbour
or when the Carthaginians were thwarted
from capturing Syracuse, or when Aeneas,
in his wanderings, approached Sicily.
Dark grey pumice, heavy, pockmarked like
moon craters, still smelling distantly
of the sea, it rests on a mantelpiece
next to a bit of driftwood slight as balsam,
shaped like a small fish, found on Deganwy beach
by Afon Conwy – stolen goods, contraband,
freighted with histories.
By David Selzer