I have pictures here of things I don’t remember seeing,
places I don’t remember being, in “Rome, the Eternal—
Treasurehouse of Western Culture,” as Fodor’s has it.
I do recall a bag of artichoke sandwiches eaten in the rain
on the steps of the Temple of Venus and Rome,
you coming down with bronchitis and having to spend four days
coughing in bed, how I waited out a rain delay in a café
along the Via Veneto getting wired on two
or three too many espressos and reading P.G. Wodehouse.
And, of course, the Colosseum, where we walked the day
we arrived, talking of Daisy Miller, where a cabbie
too insistent, too persuasive to ignore, accosted us.
For 20,000 lire, give or take a thousand, he said
he’d show us Rome, and did he ever. Gothic charges
across well-defended intersections and persecutions
of the slow and indecisive brought us down Via Appia Antica
to the catacombs of San Callisto, where this madman
bullied us to the front of a line of tourists,
you remarking how the best way out is through,
me counting lire and thinking how sweetness draws flies.
Then on past ruins coming thick as flies—the Forum,
the Temple of the Vestal Virgins, the Arch of Janus,
Nero’s House of Gold, the Baths of Diocletian—
to a screeching halt in heavy traffic, where our driver
made you stand in the middle of the street
before Hadrian’s pyramid and ordered me to take your picture
because “this is really something.” We ran
to the Protestant cemetery to see the graves
of Keats and Shelley, our cabbie bewildered
(just two more stiffs, I’m sure he thought impatiently).
Back in the cab, we barreled past the Pantheon,
the Villa Borghese, Victor Emmanuel’s ugly monument,
the mandatory fountains and markets so beloved
by us Americans (the Fountain of Trevi shut down and dry).
We stopped at San Pietro in Vincoli where a priest
charged us 500 lire each (and made us leave five minutes later)
to see Michelangelo’s Moses and the chains that bound St. Peter
(“my baby’s got me locked up in chains,” the Beatles sang
in my foolish head the while). Last stop, San Paolo fuori le Mura
where again photography was urged upon us, this time the two of us
posed before a statue of St. Paul, apostle to us gentiles,
sword in hand, scowling out at a taxing, godless world.
And here, I thought, is the scam unfolded, us smiling
like two American Express chumps about to have our wallets lifted,
our guide running back toward his cab, my camera in hand,
surely to jump in and off. But no. He turned, fiddled,
cursed two nuns who dared to walk into the viewfinder’s field,
squinted, and snapped our picture, the only one we have
of both of us together, light bouncing off the church’s gilt façade
like a nimbus about St. Paul and us (you and I smiling
apprehensively, to be sure), the shot well framed and focused,
the exposure exact: a fragment saved from all those ruins,
for which I must offer a late apology and thanks.