Last night, with Rafaella,
I sat at one of the outside tables
At Rosati watching the ragazzi on Vespas
Scream through the Piazza del Popolo
And talked again about changing my life,
Doing something meaningful—perhaps
Exploring a continent or discovering a vaccine,
Falling in love or over the white falls
Of a dramatic South American river!—
And Rafaella
Stroked the back of my wrist as I talked,
Smoothing the hairs until they lay as quietly
As wheat before the old authoritarian wind.
Rafaella had just returned from Milano
Where she’d supervised the Spring collection
Of a famous, even notorious, young designer—
A man whose name brought tears to the eyes
Of contessas, movie stars, and diplomats’ wives
Along the Via Condotti or the Rue
Du Faubourg Saint-Honoré.
So I felt comfortable there, with Rafaella,
Discussing these many important things, I mean
The spiritual life, and my own
Long disenchantment with the ordinary world.
Comfortable because I knew she was a sophisticated,
Well-traveled woman, so impossible
To shock. A friend who’d
Often rub the opal on her finger so slowly
It made your mouth water,
The whole while telling you what it would be like
To feel her tongue addressing your ear.
And how could I not trust the advice
Of a woman who, with the ball of her exquisite thumb,
Carefully flared rouge along the white cheekbones
Of the most beautiful women in the world?
Last night, as we lay in the dark,
The windows of her bedroom open to the cypress,
To the stars, to the wind knocking at those stiff
Umbrella pines along her garden’s edge,
I noticed as she turned slowly in the moonlight
A small tattoo just above her hip bone—
It was a dove in flight or an angel with its
Head tucked beneath its wing,
I couldn’t tell in the shadows . . .
And as I kissed this new illumination of her body
Rafaella said, Do you know how to tell a model?
In fashion, they wear tattoos like singular beads
Along their hips,
but artists’ models
Wear them like badges against the daily nakedness,
The way Celestine has above one nipple that
Minute yellow bee and above
The other an elaborate, cupped poppy . . .
I thought about this,
Pouring myself a little wine and listening
To the owls marking the distances, the geometries
Of the dark.
Rafaella’s skin was
Slightly damp as I ran my fingertip
Along each delicate winged ridge of her
Collarbone, running the harp length of ribs
Before circling the shy angel . . .
And slowly, as the stars
Shifted in their rack of black complexities above,
Along my shoulder, Rafaella’s hair fell in coils,
Like the frayed silk of some ancient tapestry,
Like the spun cocoons of the Orient—
Like a fragile ladder
To some whole other level of the breath.
(Rome)