On the Street of Divine Love: New and Selected Poems

Ode to Augurs, Ogres, Acorns, and Two or Three Things That Have Been Eating at My Heart Like a Wolverine in a Time of Famine

25 Ode to Augurs, Ogres, Acorns, and Two or Three Things That Have Been Eating at My Heart Like a Wolverine in a Time of Famine So many birds are flying above my house it must mean something or how could the Romans have built their roads and cities based on the movement of sparrows and falcons in the sky above the Capitoline Hill, Caesars asking the augurs when they should cross the Rubicon, poison their wives, conquer Asia Minor, and as geese cut across my sky in a sharp V or starlings swarm into the church tower at sunset I can see how the Etruscans and later the Romans would look to the clouds and these last remnants of the dinosaurs to help them make their way in the world, so I believe in birds as I believe in the mad woman on my street in Florence who lifts her skirt to show her stuff to anyone who won’t look away, or Merchino, the tall gaunt man with a short torso who stalks down the Borgo la Croce like a savage medieval prince covered with tattoos, and when he passes me as I leave our apartment or walk through the market, I feel as if he is pulling the moment in a swirling tornado above his head, lifting me in its wake like a magician, though Fabio tells me he has done time for armed robbery, which is a kind of sorcery in itself, evil magi of the passeggiata, when Italians walk out before dinner arm in arm, boys with boys, girls with girls, couples old and middle aged, all in the dying light. Or think of last fall when the three oak trees in our yard rained down a plague of acorns, pummeling our roof all night as if a Nazi panzer division had popped through the fabric of time, though their bullets less malign, 26 and the squirrels so roly-poly that the cats could finally dream of catching them as Pharaoh dreamed of the seven fat cows and the seven lean cows, foretelling the seven years of plenty and the seven years of famine, so what do the acorns mean in their mysterious plentitude, if anything, because the world can trick you, as when I was driving toward New Orleans on I-10, and in the gloaming the semis were bearing down on my little white Toyota as if they were ogres from a fairy tale—giant, muscular killing machines, gobbling up everything in their path, though most of the drivers were probably thinking about dinner or Kansas or turning the garage into a sunroom, so maybe the sparrows and acorns are just sparrows and acorns and the glorious inhabitants of the streets around Santa Croce are not magis and hag goddesses, though as I walk down the cobblestone street and the light casts its spell over the city I seem to see something on the edges of my vision, a wolverine-masked earth sprite running along the edges of any path I take as the sun sets in the dark woods. There’s Leonardo trudging up Monte Cassine to test his flying machine, Dante skulking away to Ravenna, all our crashes and exiles tearing at our hearts like wild animals reminding us how far we are from home. ...