Faker, and: Italian Square

FAKER

I have a sensitive-looking face, which I use to advantage.At night I take my sensitive-looking face outsidewhere people are gathered at tables, posting picturesand acting out their deaths. What good are they to mewho seem so real? My sensitive-looking face glowslike a sign for the living. I want them to see my sign,my outside face, through which all this feeling is funneled.

ITALIAN SQUARE

Hecht saw a hill here. On second thoughtit turned out to be a vision of Poughkeepsie,half symbol, half childhood memory.Walcott waited years to touch terrainthis raked over. And Howells remarked,in a memorable, near-forgotten phrasechiseled into the side of a buildingin one of the country's smaller citiesgirdling a hill, like a monument to the war dead,here lies the home of human nature.Glück studied the moon above itwhile reinventing Pavese for the first time.As if it were a sore subject nettlinga family, the country remains unnamed.Her village any village. Her lettuces plain lettuce.McHugh found poetry in the silence of its statues,but when Hugo heard Kennedy had been shot,Italians chased him across the squarewith their "noisy knives of why" and he weptlike a "perfect wop." Wilbur fell in lovewith the music a wall fountain made,but by the end of the century, Henri Colefound nothing there but bobbing Fanta cans,a kind of poetry dead, and the freedomone feels when things have changed for good.