My child’s night shadow on the Pantheon lengthens
into the passato remoto,
the distant past.
One without our many lights
along the street, blinking from cars and motorini
speeding over the bumps.

The past of relatives further south, dead for so long
that their bones were transferred, maybe by hand,
maybe with or without ceremony,
from their burial place
into a well in the middle of the walled cemetery.
The relatives who couldn’t –
or maybe rather didn’t –
travel across the mountains to Naples’ port
and across the ocean in the rounded bottom
of a ship to what became the home of
those who did leave.

Whose descendants we visit
in their town built into the side of the mountain,
walls straight, roads steep.
The dialect here relies on the plural second person,
voi. As in, all of you.

Even us.