Ricordami

I have been sitting on this train for the past half-hour
watching gently rolling green hills and those strange stone pines
slide at an easy pace past my window like the silk-screen scenery on
rollers in pre- "moving picture" theaters, absentmindedly thinking
that there could be no place on Earth the Sun loves
so well as Italy.
Watching this scene, drinking bitter coffee,
I have been pondering the history of a bicycle.
Well-loved, its chrome polished to gleaming and its basket newly repaired,
it leans on its kickstand drunkenly, like the birbanti
who hold up the walls that line the Campo dei Fiori, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes.
The leaves of the olive trees nearby shine as silver as the bike and a little ways off
an old man in a broad-brimmed hat and red suspenders carries a newspaper and
checks the tree trunks for signs of rot.

I have been laying on the beach for the past six hours,
pushing the black sand of Positano beneath my toes and working on a fresh sunburn,
sipping boxed wine and praying for more days like this,
more oceans this electrically blue, more men like those that stand in the tourist boats
outside La Grotta Azzura in Capri, laughing and smoking and singing opera songs.
Looking up at the cliffs as I float in the Mediterraneao,
I have been contemplating modernity
in the form of the daily grocery run of a small widow,
her black cloth-covered head bobbing with effort or ease as she walks past
pastel buildings and the glittering dome of a church and a Vespa chained to a guardrail,
carefully pulling her little cart up a path that seems to rise at an Sisyphean angle,
finally entering a tiny appartamento with a calico cat perched on the balcony.
I gaze up at the clouds and don't want to wash the salt from my hair.

I have been walking the cobblestones of Roma for months, for forever,
past the cobbler and the Macelleria, hearing men call "Ciao bella, bellezza", 
smiling at couples in love and stopping in Piazza Navona to watch a child learn the names
of the birds that land atop Neptune's head in the Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi,
listening to folk songs from the street performers and the call of the shopkeeps
selling watercolors and performance art and memories.
Wandering through shaded alleyways towards home,
I have been thinking that one loves this city like old leather,
for its longevity and softness and for its sheen and its cracks, you couldn't love it
so well if it were new.
I get a little lost and a little tired,
I eat frutti di bosco gelato and roasted castagne, accidentally sightseeing while
ducking under laundry lines and chipping paint off of the walls, climbing hills and
breathing air that tastes like honeysuckle and picking the wild poppies that glow like
drops of blood along the sides of the road,
Feeling like a part of this red, red life under this blue, blue sky.