This is a poem called "Italian Days."
And it has a lot of Italian place names in it.
If you haven't been to Italy, it will mean totally zip to you.
But they sound good, you know?
You should let them just wash over you and think, god,
I've got to go there too.
It sounds so good or whatever.
But ultimately, as the writers always say,
the poem doesn't depend on that.
The poem depends on the relationship
between the line I have between the heaven, the fixed stars,
and the page here.
But in any case, it does have something to do--
[LAUGHTER]
It does have something to do with the location.
But they're very nice names.
And if you were ever 23 once or 24, or 25,
or if you ever hoped to get that age, listen closely.
"Italian Days."
Thinking again of a weekend trip to Ferrara,
Cosimo Tura on one wall, Miss d'Este long gone from the next,
I took from Verona once, a place where the streets were as wide
as Parisian boulevard, the pole like a frayed rope out
past the bulge of the dikes.
The weekend before, I'd been to Merano and back,
and almost become a squib in the Stars and Stripes
when the helicopter's engine stopped thousands of feet
above the Brenner highway.
And we began to slide sideways down the air as quietly
as a snowflake.
The huge rotary blades above us circling like paddle
turns in the wind languidly.
The stillness abrupt, the plane in a long slip like a scimitar
curve toward the ground rising to meet us,
its trees focusing automatically larger with each look as though
raised through a microscope.
The engine catching at last on its last turn.
Pine branches less than 50 feet below us.
The blade slide bottoming out as we started to rise and swing
north up the Val d'Adige and into the emerald sundown
outside Merano.
Back up out of darkness an hour later,
the houses beginning to flash on like
matches below, left over Trento and left over Schio and down.
Everyone out to supper, the waitress
admonishing Manzolin, "non si taglia la pasta."
Cut to Ferrara, and me threading my way out of town
through bicycles, Vespas and runty Fiats
south to Ravenna and Rimini, the lap of the Adriatic and western
Byzantium, in the long grasses of S. Apollinare in Classe,
the field stubble gold in the noon sun.
Cut to Verona, the town I always left from,
work over and happy hour, Modugno on every phonograph
on Via Mazzini, "ciao, ciao, bambina..."
It's 1959, and after supper, everyone disappearing like rain
from the streets and Caffé Dante, the fog in,
Can Grande skulking and disappearing
in marble above his tomb as I do along the cobblestones
he grins down on.
Gone through the fog toward Santa Anastasia and the Due
Torri, everything swaddled as though in newsprint.
The river off to the right like a licking sound.
Up past the Duomo than right across the last bridge where
the beggar loomed in her burning chair.
Each night as I passed her, it took 100 lire
to put out the fire.
Up north in the watersheds and rock slides of the Dolomites,
snow has been leaving its same message
for thousands of years on the bark of the cedar trees.
There's no stopping the comings and goings in this world.
No stopping them to and fro.
Palladio's buildings shone like the collar on someone's dog
in Vicenza, the only inscript in all the town.
For the rest, it was Goldstein patrolling the avenues
at sundown with hot hands.
And Venezia, lord of the bees, and the dark halves
of the Hotel Artù with hot hands.
It was Charles with hot hands, his fingers on this and that
wherever he turned in the bars of Little America.
It was weekend and off duty and kicking
the gong in a foreign country, left foot and right foot.
Sister water, brother fire, gentle my way across,
one foot on the river, one foot in the flames.
My lack of ability to remember it right.
The time we spotted the Vicentine, for instance,
it rained and dimpled all the way back, with Grace in his lap
and him driving, sneezing, and making amends.
On alternate Sundays, we'd drive to Soave and Asolo, Padova
and the Euganean Hills, always looking for the event,
not knowing that we were it.
This was the world we lived in and couldn't get shut of.
And these were the rocks we walked on, Milano, Certosa,
footstep after footstep, echoing down the galleries.
Goldstein checking the nuns out.
Venezia settling like smoke at the unbitten center of things.
One Sunday after the Trattoria La Brera,
we went to Scuderi's place.
His huge canvases stacked like sheet rock against the wall.
I have to keep them like this, he
said, to keep my life in order.
He died the next winter, the heater electrocuting him
in the bathtub.
Some nights when the stars flash their gang codes
and the fog slides in as cautiously
as a bride across the steps the trees make up from the sea,
and the gnatlight starts to solidify
like a crust on the palm leaf and the pepper switch,
and the smell of the paper whites hangs like a June garden
above the kitchen table, Scuderi calls out my name
as I climb the six flights to his room
and stand in the doorway again.
Electric and redivivus in the world of light
he lived in inside his paintings for all those years.
Vaseline light through the slow filter of late November.
Acid light off the North Italian lakes,
shorthand of light from the olive
leaves as they turn and tick in the wind.
Last light of the dopoguerra lifting Milan like a ship
in the Lombardy night outside his window
on top of the city wall, bar light and aftermath.
Scuderi whitening to grain- out and then
to blank, light like a sheet of paper everywhere,
flat and unwrinkled, and unreturnable.
At the end of the last word, when night
comes walking across the lake on its hands
and nothing appears in the mirror,
or has turned to water where nothing walks or lies down,
what will your question be?
Whistling the dogs of mold in, giving them meat,
what will it profit you?
No thought of that back then.
Bivouacked outside the castle above Marostica,
whose walls down swept and pinioned the town like wings
in its coming to rest,
the town square blocked out like a chessboard, black and white.
Black and white from up there, where the rook looked down
on the knight's play.
What eschatology of desire could move us in those days?
What new episiotomy of the word?
At San Gimignano, outside of town,
I did see that no one could last for good,
that no one could answer back from the other side.
Still, I'd like to think I've learned how to speak to them.
I'd like to think I know how to conjugate
"can you hear me" and "what?"
In Rome on the Via Cassia, there was opportunity enough
for that in the catacombs.
The lost bodies slipped in their slots
like letters someone had never answered, and then tossed out.
A chance to step back from the light
of the strong electric bulb, and ask again,
if our first day in the dark is our comfort or signature.
Most of what I remember had nothing to do with any of that,
it turns out.
A view from the Pinacoteca window across Siena one
morning in 1959, and out to the hillscapes and olive shine.
The way Piero della Francesca's Madonna del Parto
was leaning against the wall in Monterchi, and still unlit.
The eel fisherman that May twilight along the Mincio
River.
But Scuderi did, and the helicopter
did, and the full moon like Borso's skull on the Zaterre,
fog smoking up from the humped lagoon.
And Eve coming out of Adam's rib on San Zeno's doors in Verona.
Her foot still stuck in his side.
And the morning we sat on the terrace, Jim Gates,
and Tom Fucile, and I, in Bassano,
the bowler of Monte Grappa across the valley, ghost hat
on the head of northern Italy.
There is, in the orchards of Sommacampagna,
a sleet like and tenuous iridescence
that falls through the peach trees whenever it rains.
The blossoms parachute to the ground
so heavy and so distinct.
And the light above Riva spokes out
from under the clouds like Blake.
The wires for the grape vines beading their little rainbows.
The cars planing by on the highway,
shooshing their golden plumes.
What gifts there are are all here, in this world.