I.

When Christ had driven the money-changers
out of the temple, he couldn’t foresee
the irony— two thousand years later,
I’m outside of the Vatican City
haggling over a Pope in a snow dome
as my wife digs for Lire in her purse.
There is a perverse energy to Rome,
especially inside St. Peter’s Church
where saints and martyrs vie for attention
in the tapestries, frescoes, and friezes—
even the Pieta near the entrance
eroticizes Mary and Jesus,
with their smooth bodies in blissful repose
like lovers having a post-coital smoke.

II.

Joah points to a handsome youth and swoons:
“I could see him in an underwear ad.”
For the remainder of the afternoon
I imagine the slight Italian man
in boxer briefs, tensing for a camera.
In the evening, we take our gracious hosts
to watch “Wozzeck,” a German opera,
then make our way backstage after the show
by posing as American pop stars.
Zubin Mehta fields reporter’s questions
while the lead actor drinks bottled water
and blots his armpits with a wet napkin.
“Do you speak English?” I ask in German.
“Bloody well should.” he quips. “I’m from England.”

III.

On the train back to Florence, my wife rests
as the cypress trees outside the window
gradually recede into the mist
then fade altogether in the shadows.
I stare into the distance, eyes half-closed,
and remember the previous morning:
the frantic mothers running toward the Pope
when he entered the square in a white Jeep,
comically ascending the marble steps
like Ernest Hemingway on safari,
his arms shaking as he reached out to bless
the frightened children. Then I fall asleep
and dream of a woman in the desert
wandering in the sand with a hair shirt.

IV.

I’m jostled awake in the train station,
and immediately look for a pen
to commit the images to paper.
I dreamt of the Penitent Magdalene,
Donatello’s apocryphal figure
in the museum behind the Duomo
which I had visited the week before.
In every doorway, a guard was posted
reminding the tourists: “Please do not touch.”
Their words now took the shape of a poem—
a reference to Mary being rebuffed
after Jesus Christ crawled out of his tomb
and said to her “Noli Me Tangere”
when she threw herself at his wounded feet.

V.

I was uprooted by Donatello—
my trunk carved into a woman’s body,
bent in an eternal contrapposto,
and christened the Apocryphal Mary,
Thus my creator was finished with me
and placed me in a room with large sculptures
where I stood unmolested many years—
when at last, a great flood broke through the doors,
spilling high above the window ledges.
I floated quickly past the Bargello
and saw the bottoms of the old bridges
as I traveled down the turbid Arno
behind Cimabue’s yellow Jesus
and Ghiberti’s gold Gates of Paradise.

The clock reclaims the room one murmur at a time.
Smoke thins; the glasses dry to chalky rings.
The sheets uncrease. What loosened learns its seam.
Your breath goes even. Nothing touches, clings.
A cat cries once beneath the radiator,
or maybe that was earlier—before
the light was killed, before the second pour,
before your watch came off beside the door.
The minute hand returns what it displaced:
the words you practiced, then the careful pause;
the bedroom clock, still ticking out of phase;
the name I didn’t ask you to withdraw.
At last the hour yields what started this—
a body standing where it wasn’t yet a kiss.

I tell myself the house is only wood,
old nails, a roof that leaks when God feels bored.
But every dusk it tilts—a confessional door
ajar—inviting and accusing. You stood
at the kitchen counter, haloed the way
cheap bulbs sanctify a lover leaving.
I watched the terrazzo patterns weave
our shadows, even as they pulled away.
Forgive me—though I never learned for what.
My tongue still tastes of penny metals, sin’s
small currency. “We’re fine,” I said, the thin
lie cracked like plaster in a too-cold spot.
And just like that, the evening filled the room,
light receding from a familiar wound.

I write this with the sun behind my back,
flat on a chipped green table—rough Formica
cold as a hospital tray. I stalled, the brightest
flecks reflecting light like sins I can’t retract.
“Can you be saved?” you asked. Christ—your knack
for dissecting me—and my maniacal
habit of drafting grief into a mythical
shape—left me split between attack
and retreat. What’s needed, I suppose,
is not revision—just the truth: how women
draw us in with that unguarded pose,
the grace note just before the guillotine. Again
I tried to mend the poem, stitch its prose—
no sentence saves it; nothing here will close.

I.

She pushes her cat like a sacrifice
over the soft edge of the water bed
to mingle on the rug in the sunlight
with paperbacks annotated in red
and crushed cigarette butts in coffee tins.
In the window, elongated figures
are frozen behind her saffron curtains,
like relics in primordial amber
or Greeks adorning a black-figure vase—
a primitive diorama where light
throws canted shadows over the bookcase
past the kitchen wall—while her sleeping mind
quietly imposes an obverse world
behind her eyes, the shades of Grecian girls.

II.

Like the Ergastines in procession
passing half-dazed through a marble city,
she marvels at her unbidden passions
preserved for antiquity, in a frieze
forever fixed within the pediment
above her, mounted on her bedroom wall.
Then her sable cat pounces on the bed—
she wakes, stares at the alabaster vault:
What is divinity if it can come
only in dreams, after reading a book?
She looks over to the glowing curtains,
to the strange figures with extended necks
floating, Giacometti-like, in the sun,
who, voice by voice, seem almost alien.

III.

The tyrant god invented his own birth,
invisible spirits strewn about him,
and he moved among us, composing worlds
and the stubborn leavings of his system—
with neither allegiance to earthly souls
nor fear of a god more omnipotent
to move or mitigate such requital,
to desire something other than himself.
And from his nebulous perch, divided
man in twain, giving him body thetans
to antagonize his vulnerable side
like the vultures pecking at Tityus.
The muttering king, listless in the clouds,
thus filled the world with a peculiar doubt.

IV.

She says: "I’m gladdened when my Bombay cat
returns to me—bounding from the rug."
She floats on her wide bed, her noontide raft,
and navigates the emptiness above,
the splintered beams where every lucid thought
must interpose: "Where, then, is paradise?"
As if watching martyrs chained to a rock,
she places her hands over her eyes
to avert that ancient catastrophe,
the slow encroachment of the years
now shuffling like a chorus at her feet,
long after the sunlight has disappeared—
further into the water bed, she sinks
as it undulates on suspended dreams.

I. The Estranged Wife

A poem needs rooms, it needs the conceit
of a history. Seal this history
in an envelope, push it underneath
a lonely woman’s door. Make it evening.
Give her things she can use: a living room,
a fireplace, a small lamp on a table,
a telephone, a window, the moon,
a row of photographs on the mantel.
Sometime after midnight, the telephone
will ring. When she answers, she may study
the pictures, then come to a conclusion.
Her left ear is warm. She is listening.
Every picture is a discrete moment
which has indiscreetly lost its moment.

II. Twilight of the Idols

The day passes, the autumn light slanting
through the blinds and onto the window ledge
as the sun tangents the tips of the trees.
Our two black cats hide underneath the bed
when an airplane passes in the distance,
its low rumble lingering in the sky
then tapering slowly into silence
along with the last vestiges of light.
The neighborhood dogs bark in unison
at some indiscernible animal
and the blue glow of the television
casts cobalt shadows on the bedroom wall.
I pull you toward me to kiss your neck,
your cold back pressing against my stomach.

III. The Lucid Husband

The moon crystallized to sugar last night,
Ants crawled over its surface, gathering
in craters, visible to naked eyes.
It was shaping into a strange morning:
the paper was delivered an hour late,
our cat menaced a bag in the corner—
outside the front window, a meter maid
wrote tickets without pausing her scooter,
like Lao Tzu scribbling the Tao Te Ching
on horseback. Even more peculiar:
the furniture was gone—the house empty,
save for a small radio on the floor,
Patsy Cline’s sweet tremolo now drifting
from the living room into the kitchen.

IV. Lover’s Leap

A phone is ringing in the upstairs room.
You answer it politely in your mind—
perhaps your future ghost is calling you,
to tell you now to look beneath the blinds,
carefully pull upon the vinyl string
and bare the pages of a tattered will
purposely lodged between the frosted teeth
of a splintered pane and the window sill,
a checklist for the hopeful suicide
to review before some Brechtian leap—
just a cursory glance may well suffice
to nudge you further from the edge of sleep.
Feed the cat. Return your physician’s call.
Make sure you clear the hedges when you fall.

Garden walks are fraught with implications:
a kiss in Gethsemane’s shaded slopes
gave rise to wars and coronations,
zealots trading blades for priestly robes;
under Athens’ trellises, lads pressed
to catch the Master’s quips like drops of wine;
and Babylonian kings, in arbors dressed,
read battle scripts in every tangled vine.
Tonight we graft ourselves to them—we take
slow steps beneath the interlacing boughs—
each furtive touch a covenant we make,
bound by martyrs, kings, and Aristotle’s brow.
Let reason wait—desire will speak like this:
the breath before the dialectic and a kiss.

On the edge of a hill, on a warm day
I asked you to marry me, and you said:
“There is nothing, not one thing that remains

for me to consider.” The wedding came
and went, we settled into a long bed
on the edge of a hill, on a warm day.

In September, we tirelessly made
new friends, then lovers, who’d come to forget
there is nothing, not one thing that remains

constant in this life. We lost them in May,
and then became bitter, filled with contempt
on the edge of a hill, on a warm day.

“I love you” we said each night through the pain,
like a rote incantation to the dead.
There is nothing, not one thing that remains

sacred, I thought. By June, you moved away,
the house empty, our money divided.
On the edge of a hill, on a warm day
there is nothing, not one thing that remains.

Why was I so compelled, that speaking those
words, I felt a shift—some tacit wheel
turning in the current of our lives?
I’m no mystic. Such visions do not heal.
I’m secretly bourgeois. Do I love you?
I want to be an ascetic—slip the rope,
step from the ledger of desire and rue,
leave little but a name, a fact, a hope.
From Siddhartha to Schopenhauer, all
nihilism keeps its counsel in the dharma:
Desire is the root of suffering—the small
and local truth behind this mantra:
Why was I so compelled, those words released?
A current broke. Something reversed. Or ceased.

I.

Be as an empty house. Send your guests away
and let the halls go dim. Block out your children.
Lower the blinds. Let the muted gray
settle into the shape your quiet has taken.
Assign each pain its room—unfurnished, plain—
a presence you know by outline alone.
Enter when you must. Leave when you regain
the small composure absence makes its own.
The ascetic is a vessel, narrow and exact,
a conduit pared to what he will endure.
He divines the little he can of the house intact
and lets the unsolved chambers remain obscure.
There is no time for solace or display.
Only the discipline of turning things away.

II.

The romance of leaving. The romance of staying.
Two bodies in the same unlit corridor,
each testing the frame, each quietly weighing
what is kept, what loosens, what presses for more.
You built the inner rooms again—unadorned,
its thresholds cleared, the echoes unbidden.
You crossed it lightly, believing you had mourned
what needed release, your solitude thinned
to something almost bearable. Yet she arrived
without design, and took a room untouched—
a chamber neither grief nor will supplied,
though both had held the others just enough.
Whatever emptiness promised to allay,
she is the one you must never turn away.

There is the image that is removed
from the source: the room unmaking space
around a candle—the light denuded,
a breath withdrawing from its place.
Or the space around that breath—where we
hold our bodies in the mirror’s frame,
repeating some inherited degree
of mother, father—gestures without name.
To be inside and outside the room,
to be inside and outside our bodies—
the light does not distinguish. Assume
the eye returns to where it used to be,
and thought, unlit, divides what we are taught:
two bodies bending toward one thought.