Return to Rome

Today in Rome, heading down Michelangelo’s Spanish Steps, under an unchanging moon, I held on to the balustrade, grateful for his giving me a hand. All for love, I stumbled over the past as if it were my own feet. Here, in my twenties, I was lost in love and poetry. Along the Tiber, I made up Cubist Shakespearean games. (In writing, even in those days, I cannot say it was popular to have “subjects” any more than painters used sitters. But I did.) I played with an ignorant mirror for an audience: my self, embroiled with personae from Antony and Cleopatra. Delusions of grandeur! They were for a time my foul-weather friends— as once I played with soldiers on the mountainous countryside of a purple blanket. 2002