Moon moves quickly across the via.
Piazza assembles and braces for its second sacking
of the night. Remember and mourn, here, in this place,
the pitiable suicide of Julius Caesar. Train your eye
to observe everything: watch how this staircase
moves up itself. The bizarre and unsettling appearance
of an ampersand in a foreign language—how bone-like,
how oddly raw. Small-to-big, small-to-big demands to return
home to small again. Thank them for being wonderful international
surrogates.
“We have scientific explanations for clouds,”
someone opines after a long moment, “but it doesn’t feel that way”—
well, of course, if we’re going to bring feeling into it,
everything falls apart:
who among us wouldn’t concede
that time is a so-obvious series of nesting dolls,
huddled inside one another for warmth
in this damp Basilica. Or that faith makes
the bones real at St. Peter’s—faith
being my shorthand for terror. That
Johnny’s recollection of seeing Swiss Guard uniforms
waiting for pick-up on the racks of the dry-cleaners
across the river from the Vatican wounds us
in sad, alien ways
we can’t let ourselves feel,
let alone admit. Who foots
that dry-cleaning bill? God, obviously,
but who really, now? You love me.
I told you that already.