That poem, "Sympathétique," and this next one
take us-- their settings are American Midwest.
This mentions in the first line the Italian-American film
director Francis Ford Coppola.
Perhaps you know his work.
"Sycamore Mall."
"Coppola's Cotton Club starts at Campus 2 Cinema Saturday,
6:45 mall-time.
The Negroes in the film are played
by Blacks playing opposite the tennis shop, tobacconist,
lingerie, and antennae sales, glass-cased elevator,
and automatic bank teller, because this
is a strangeness tendered in others,
a display of the humiliated and recast human being, a thing
Michelangelo captured in marble with David
and its oversized right hand.
Because this is a tenderness strange in others,
I dined formally in a towel with daylilies and hydrangeas
on the table, fresh raspberries and roses
in their second bloom, and then sympathetically go
out on the town.
Symptomatically, it is as if I am approaching
the Doge's Palace in Venice, and the Piazza is covered with ice.
I exit my hotel on the Grand Canal, Paganelli's, and slide
arm in arm with my lover.
It was right to act back then in summer
as if I were living a love story that
would be simple with its curious, nocturnal glow,
not unlike the mall hybrid light,
where, like the single thought, there
persisted an electronic chant on the portable tape player,
as from the bowel of the basilica
the choir repeats a benediction.
No one ever touches himself in public, our Lord,
because we've all rubbed off on one another so much,
we're invisible.
And that is what has become of the tree for which our mall
received its name, with hope that it won't
be the end of the century for those who still live
by the spirit of an act on a street prepped like a movie
set.
It was right to act back then and to trust
the movement of the affair to the relationship
and insist on perfection.
It'll be a while before we are hoisted and joined
as characters on a screen in sepia tone,
for a theater inside a mall under the influence
of temperature control.
Painfully, one day we wake and haven't the right
clothes for Venice.
It has snowed as it did, we are told, once a lifetime ago.
The full evening moon floods the Piazza.
And in the morning, workers haul benches for the tourists
to pass over.
A simple pair from a painting or the marble hair of the David,
bandages art places over our eyes,
survive in Renaissance books next to the Jog and Diet shelf.
Michelangelo and Giotto appear naked to the touch, holier,
because no one is fully conscious, nor ever able
to forget anything, under the false light of the dome,
our ladies of the air conditioner, the air freshener,
the night moisturizer.
Between summer and winter of a given year,
I reflected on life to no end and fell in love, ourselves
in a lover, like art, whose strangeness
tenders a body in others."