BLUE COLLAR DEVOTIONS

                                *

Our teacher said that poets write

the poems of home away from home,

then read Shelley’s “Mutability”

and Wordsworth’s “Mutability”

and something of his own to us

to prove the point, which on no level

could I understand, confusing mutable

with silent—he made me look it up—

disbelieving home would ever change.

*

Cortege of clouds here,

terracotta rooftile,

its moss, its weedy flowers,

pigeons gurgling, purring,

a flash of mirror at their throats.

Then slanting rain that stops the buskers.

Then sun that starts them up again.

Sheets of aluminum,

sheets of gold,

what was begun erased,

erased resumed,

in a circle the sky keeps track of.

*

Having learned efficiency cleaning houses,

Nana’s untied her rain cap, knocked

the drops off, and scrubbed my face with spit

the smell of lipstick all in one go,

as my mother, her only child, pulls

mascara blackly through pale lashes,

opening her starburst eyes to read

books with her father, two dreamy readers

who carry umbrellas, wishing for rain,

while my father with wet hands unloads

his service weapon at the door, rounds

hidden one place, pistol another, coins he

means for me to pilfer dropped in plain sight.

*

When raccoons came for our beer, the boys threw

our empties at them. When we said we were 

leaving and they flicked their cigarette butts instead,

the raccoons just picked them up and held them

like Frank Sinatra. I read in the library later

raccoons make great predators because they are

a lot like us. Between reading Edith Hamilton’s 

Mythology and Khalil Gibran, I thought about

my period first and crush second. When the boys

played The Doors my best friend and I went

to her room to practice kissing and lip-synch

The Jackson 5. Alone I played Carole King and

dreamed of flying with my own arms out

the window over the trees. I was interested

in achieving figure eights around the city’s 

landmarks horizontally and around the cloud 

formations vertically, and though I’d never been, 

Connecticut sounded like a good place to go.

*

In a niche of the palazzo, one recessed arch, really, five storeys tall,

someone has made his home: like mine, unseen from the square;

unlike mine, cardboard floor, sleeping bags, a bentwood café chair,

its back to me. Since 1919 the palace has housed an art collection,

and in this city of paintings, it almost looks as if he’s painted himself

in, safe from rain, the scale of stone offset by bare skin, pigeons,

water bottles, a growing circle of Renaissance geometries.

I’m a stranger here, but not the only one. The gardens and museum

teem with tourists; in 1944, during the bombings, local evacuees

camped out in both, the art having been moved already to 

safety. We protect what we value. Leonardo drafted the ideal

proportions of the human body: navel at the center of a circle,

genitals at the center of a square. Vitruvian Man is rarely

displayed as any extended exposure to light will destroy it.

*

Every painter paints himself, said Leonardo,

and so many others the maxim cannot be 

definitively attributed. Writers also

write themselves, using I, to quote Stendhal,

as the quickest way to tell the story.

He was first to record a condition later

named for him, Stendhal Syndrome, 

a literal art attack, in which a viewer is struck

by beauty so sublime they faint or suffer

other symptoms Italian physicians still treat

today—Botticelli’s Venus is often cited 

as a cause. The APA insists the phenomenon

is neither a syndrome nor a diagnosis

but more a sort of mass hypnosis inspired

by tourist anticipation and the breathless,

destabilizing looking up that lauded art requires.

My mother loved the art of the Renaissance 

but only ever saw in person Michelangelo’s 

Pietà at the New York World’s Fair in ‘64. 

For a time nearby, we had a little garden

she tended, and as a child I followed 

behind as she tipped the watering can or 

pulled a weed, picking, she so often said,

her best blooms. My strong hands, greedy 

eyes: even now I believe my avarice rivaled 

only by the Medici and Rockefellers. 

How else to explain my devotion to looking

intently up in the museums and down 

in the gardens, why I must visit every

flower and will not pick a single one.

*

I rode in the saddle

with him, and when we neared

the wooden arm, he’d lift me high above

his head and hold me over the edge saying, Reach,

Reach. It didn’t matter if I got it. I don’t remember if I ever

did. Let’s go again, I’d say. Or maybe he said that.

And so, we did, again and again. The brass

ring was not the metaphor.

The circle was.

*

A school group is discussing anatomical correctness

while I pretend not to eavesdrop

and consider how the sculpture, if I touched it,

would feel as cold and hard 

as they’d felt.

The first time

the funeral director said not to bring the shoes

and the clothes could be altered to fit, I didn’t

understand. Like when I learned the stars I counted

might not be there.

The concept, figural woman,

face of a Madonna, body strong and polished 

as a power lifter’s. And so tired—had she eaten

the poppies underfoot?—perfect

in repose, time and her place in it

nothing to her now, nowhere

to shine but here.

*

Six of us on the old bedspread in the grass looking up,

Pop scraping out “Twinkle Twinkle” on his fiddle.

We kids had named the dog that. She’s here, too,

silken ears, white scruff whiter in the moonlight.

I’d learned the word bucolic and kept trying to use it

in a sentence. Pigeons that shuffled through the grass

had gone home. Why hadn’t we? The sculpture was 

Night, reclining like us. School yard of stars, in clusters

or alone. Some whose voices carried, others streaking

fast across the asphalt. Those are meteors, said someone,

probably not me, always a lag between what I thought

and what was. Star logic, light that reaches us after.

*

A text from no one

in my contacts reads

Where are you now?

The area code my own from childhood,

causing me to want to reply 

with exact coordinates, a weather update,

and details of the view from here:  

clouds, cypress, star jasmine, the shadows

of shirts that wave their arms from clotheslines,

small pot of rosemary on the sill trailing

in fullest sun its branches. 

Have you found me yet? 

Used millennia ago 

to embalm the dead. Rosemary, 

Ophelia said, for remembrance.

In Dante’s Paradiso,

Beatrice explains why angels have no need

for memory, being of undivided mind,

and though I struggle with the poet’s 

hierarchies of spherical orders,

I understand, no angel myself, this:

I saw the child my father was, 

at the end. Original skull, 

eyes filled with elsewhere

even as he read his prayerbook, mouthing

words, dribbling some. A circle,

closing—and my mother, her mother, her father,

their grandchildren once

light as air. Here are the poems, Keats wrote.

Committed to memory, we say.

If not there, where 

are we to find them.