1.

Ribbons of woodsmoke rising

from the pig-farm chimneys

below Muzzano, a morning’s

laundry frozen stiff

in the winter air, he’d sit

perched on the monastic window-ledge,

over the valley, in the wan light

of a January afternoon, strains

of Mahler or Monteverdi

on the rented Phillips in the room

behind him, recordings purloined

from the Villa de Nobili’s

disused archive. Braced against the chill,

he’d conjure the punishing noonday sun

in Rome that August, the scorching footsoles

of his paper-thin sandals seeking relief

under some narrow pediment’s scant shadow.

Hurrying along the blind facades of the shuttered

buildings, slapping up the empty, heat-blasted

pavements, he’d escape

into the shady paths of the Borghese Gardens

to sit beside those inscrutable Etruscans,

and fathom, or so he’d hoped, some meaning

in their serene, sarcophagal,

argillaceous quiet.

2.

Some days he’d seek shelter

among the fragrant shelves

of the English bookstore, two flights down

From John Keats’ last rooms

beside the Scalinata, and once,

at the price of two meals,

purchasing an exquisite little Blake there,

a gift for the jovial, skeletal

Jesuit who’d danced merrily

his jocular danse macabre

before his class each morning

at the blackboard on Monte Mario,

shirt-tails flying, flourishing

his passkeys to the hermetic lore

of integrals and infinitesimals.

This farewell gift of Blake

had seemed a suitable complement

to that master’s own delighting,

his eager, matutinal enactment

of countless angels swirling

across a calculus of impossibly tiny spaces.

3.

Those days at Rome and Muzzano

and Padua, of life in the shadow

of the Scrovegni, amid the amiable ghosts

of Galileo Galilei and the vainglorious Gattamelata,

of excursions north into the Engadina,

into the Dolomites, of pilgrimages

to Arqua, to the Titians at the Accademia,

to stroke the cool, accessible porphyry

of the inscrutable Tetrarchs at San Marco, 

were all now passed, now quietly domiciled

in recollections at the center of his “now”

along with other lives lived, with his brief habitation

among the Roma of Morón,

an eager little guero sitting jaléo

beside the great Diego and La Fernanda,

and La Bernarda, at dawn on the third day

of someone’s wedding.

Along the way, he learned that only

the most particular can speak truth’s vernacular,

only the most specific fact will ask us each,

as Darwin taught, and Proust,

not was this true, but is it?