Its Ghostly Workshop: Poems

The Rewiring

33 The Rewiring for Ann Tretiak & Emily Kennedy Clattering zing of the tram, motorino flash and growl, exhaust and garlic gusts, sweat tang, urine and bread on the breeze and the sweet grief of tarnished saxophone, accordion’s tattered wheez, boom ing noonquake of Gianicolo cannon and bells, all the push and babbleshriek, all the duets of greeting, markethaggle, flawless sybaritic clusters of grapes, pomodori, all the catstretched Ciaos and the perfect stiletto posture clicking the heaving cobbles that leave you wobbling past a gallows of salami, a fishschool of bananas, over the walled-in, restless, resentful river, imperial jags and jumbles through ringing rills of sunlight spraybounced into fountain, showered, veiled over marble muscle, so much texture, so much color, so much . . . Rome fancies your every Puritanical, carnal inch, rewires you, viruses you, rushes you with visionary blazes, cascades of memory, incandescent logic—everything you’ve ever read, beheld, conceived, foreseen comes at you from the battered flutes of a fallen column, the haughty toss of a handsome head, the cunning, theatrical stoop of a beggar, flaking paint, abundant verdant balcony . . . And here’s the soaring, vain intimidation of the Circus side of the Palatine, the shaped green absence at its feet hauling eyesight out of your head like harpoon rope, like fireworks. How can you see for all this seeing? Already you need the nap that’s five weeks in the future . . . STOP. Light crumbles against the faceless faces of the Tiber Island herms: Here: Touch their chalky cheeks: Touch them: 34 Catullus may have: And Clodia, Cicero, Ovid, Cleopatra, Anna Magnani . . . But Roma shoulders you on, pulls and jostles you, courses through the cords and channels of your sagging, aching body with all the bewildering intensities of childhood and sex, searing awareness of eternity’s turbulence, irrevocable change, heartless, yes, heartless continual renewal . . . ...