A Body in Motion
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When the pedal snapped clean under my footin the city’s clotted alleys, in the heartof Rome, careening my cheap bike sideways,almost into the café, into tourists with their thrivingpensions and Campari, I just barely hung on.In a video, some kid dangles from a cranefor fun, far above the avenue’s indifference,people carrying on, like needles in the groovesof their routines. I’m not sure what’s worse:recklessness or exhibition, the fact he did itor that his friend just tagged along to film.And so the air churns overhead, knocking the treessenseless, shaking their sadness out. The ducksalmost offer themselves again to our spoiled catshalf concealed in azalea at the edges of the known.And somehow we enjoy all this, the nearly happened.Caravaggio, mere days from Rome and a pardon,instead just upped and died in Porto Ercole,and of mysterious causes. Maybe the mysteryis what we wanted all along. No doubthis studio was drab. He beat his lovers, likelyate the stale bread. It’s not how fast you fall,my physics teacher told us (we were young,barely hanging onto ourselves), it’s how fast you stop. [End Page 483]
CHAD DAVIDSON is the author of From the Fire Hills (2014), The Last Predicta (2008), and Consolation Miracle (2003), all from Southern Illinois University Press. He is the co-author, along with Gregory Fraser, of Analyze Anything: A Guide to Critical Reading and Writing (Bloomsbury, 2012) and Writing Poetry: Creative and Critical Approaches (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2009). He is currently professor of literature and creative writing, and director of the School of the Arts at the University of West Georgia near Atlanta.
