Its Ghostly Workshop: Poems

Via della Scala, Trastevere

38 Via della Scala, Trastevere In town for sure now, dodging mopeds, Fiats, unruffled pedestrians, a sharp turn, slow, tight, slow, as we nose into Via della Scala, about as wide as our hallway in Virginia, full of people drinking coffee in the street, toting flowers and fruit, gesturing demurely, expansively, laughing, shrugging, some of them hobbling over the cobbles on their chewed canes, this street that once terrified me to drive, now a kind of salon which I ease right into the way Renaissance princes rode horses up spiral staircases in palazzi, now slightly downhill through shadows and light spangles and out into the broad sunlight of Piazza S. Egidio deep into its morning routines, and I park about two feet from a table at “our” cafe and, yes, there’s Al hugging a load of linens and waving in one laden hand the glittering keys. We stagger through the heavy oaken door with our book-burdened luggage, up three flights of stone steps you have to stretch for even when you don’t have post-flight legs and we are home. “Now,” I say to Delores, who stands in the middle of the living room grinning, “at last,” I say, already tasting thimbles of coffee and chocolate cornetti, “now, we can begin to live like human beings.” ...