Once in the streets of Rome
I engaged in a duel of roses,
en garde, en garde,
with Veronica Piraccini,
painter of the invisible,
connoisseur of a way to conjure
color in darkness,
who would hold her mamma’s
antique parmesan grater
between her knees,
a madonna in a fury
working that contraption
to amass a cloud of cheese
as she made a midnight
pasta carbonara for her and me.
She talked a mile a minute
(a kilometer, should I say),
peppering her Italian
with over-the-top,
the only expression in English
she ever used, a subtitle
for the comedy of her life,
while I, drunk on an excess
of vowels, held my tongue
lest she scrape her skin
or fail to check the boiling water
if a bout of mutual laughter
were to begin.
What was the spur of this humor?
Nothing less than the trouble
her beauty got her in,
one adventure after another
ending in a disastro—
flourishes of gallantry
followed by bad behavior.
How did we get those flowers?
We found a fresh bouquet
someone must have flung,
who knows why,
over the rail of a café
we’d soon be strolling by.
Rose in hand I raised my arm
to the sky, en garde,
en garde, and she,
rose in hand, raised hers.
From the outside,
how did our duel appear?
We didn’t care:
we upheld our honor,
defending our right to be there
no matter the hour.
Late it was
when we parried on the bridge
where a pope sought refuge
crossing, where the stems
of our roses crossed.
I can still hear the horns blow
in the shadow of Sant’Angelo
(Bernini’s angels in a row,
one holding Veronica’s veil)—
and a boy calling out to Veronica,
Che bella, che bella,
Marilyn Monroe,
from a wingèd scooter on the go
in the year of the Great Jubilee
at the close of the last century,
2000 anno domini,
zeros lining up anew,
a trail of pilgrims murmuring,
jostling, streaming through.
