leftover Siena angst

Bad colds and sneezes and the dust from the garbage trucks, and the pigeons who get annoyed when I walk below, and so they conspire to poop all over me, these I hate. Leaving class today there was a strange feeling, and the American girls don’t look so happy. Their boyfriends are going to war. To fight a war for oil is bad.

Let’s just do what we can to stop it.

We dream in our own minds, and I wish you could see what was inside. I have never been so close as I am right now. But I have a few reservations, I have a little bit of a doubt. Let’s go now into the night, with eager friends and a fancy flight, but we dribble water from our mouths when we are little. The ones I left behind—I hope they don’t forget me. Je suis nais pour la chaleur.

Baby I called your name, but didn’t answer when you picked up the phone. It’s such a hard thing, coming back from where I was; it’s such an awful thing to be needy again.

She doesn’t seem to care about the feast. Drawn and quartered, savage love. Killing words with your kisses, spilling worlds in between. I don’t even know how to get to the nurses tent. My blood is running out; I have to get there, but it is far. So take me down, to the best Irish pub in Siena; I will pay too much for a whisky and soda, and you can protest when I insist on the bill.

Put me away from the men on the left, who hustle along when morning rush hour roars. When the rope drops, the horses race, and it’s thirty seconds to make yourself a champion. And the bass thumps into your eardrums, and the light from the kitchen fades into soft hazes, and you rub your eyes as if awakening, in the world you know well enough to know you know you know it all too well.

Clean clean clean, because the candles burning in the cathedral leave so much wax on the walls and ceiling. And in just a few centuries your beauty fades and gets covered in soot… I saw what happened to you. The way you crumpled when they pronounced him dead. Your own husband you buried without a tear; when they shut his casket you let out a sigh. But this time you dropped the glass from your hand when the radio told you Kennedy had been shot twice in the head. You drove to the school and took your children, and brought them home without telling them why. Because you didn’t want to be alone in a world that didn’t make any sense, without its smiling Johnny. Without your first handsome president.

And you are on the highway. And I am still sitting in the street.