The poem he writes is set in Rome, on the winding road they walked one morning to get to the park that contains the museum.
They are walking slowly because they are tired, and the poet uses plain language to describe their motion. They pass a bird pecking a baguette. Maybe this isn’t even a poem, he thinks, but eventually he continues and they do as well. He’s not playing it for laughs because his audience doesn’t like funny poetry, and anyway the situation is serious—they go to the museum early so they can get many things done, so they can see great art on the other side of the city. As always, he carries the food and water. She isn’t talking and neither is he, and that’s why a poem is the correct form. His fiction is dialogue-driven because he says little in real life, and as per real life the male speaker of the poem can’t answer simple questions put to him, and he begins a new stanza, inside of which the walk continues pretty much as it once unfolded in Rome. He mumbles about how good the museum is going to be and she agrees. They drink water and test their Italian on the deserted boulevard.
The poem is becoming shit, so he adds dialogue. Nice making love to you this morning, he says, and she can’t say anything to this so she laughs—an odd reaction because usually she’d have a reply spinning in the air before he placed a period on his sentence. Maybe she isn’t his character anymore and isn’t that delightful because he’s progressed in how he’s able to mask real people, making them unreal and sympathetic at the same time. But she becomes very unsympathetic when the laugh collapses into a sneer, and suddenly masking isn’t going too well. And it’s just how she’d laugh—very underhandedly, thoughtlessness ripe and swelling, as sometimes, truly, she didn’t have to say anything. Yet those times were less memorable for him because she didn’t use words or she laughed at a low volume, but being the author of the poem he can see and hear everything, and he kind of understands why he left the relationship—it’s better to see and hear everything even if it’s bad since at least it won’t be hidden.
The poem then loses its distinction as shit and the male speaker of the poem asks why she is laughing and why won’t she use words to answer him? As he’s had direct experience with the woman alongside him, the poet answers, saying she laughs because she knows how things will turn out. Even in Rome where they are seemingly loving with each other—traces blue-black, high on the thigh, though covered, exist. The speaker of the poem asks the poet if they can go into the museum and have a fun time and not do anything else except go back to the hotel and make love, but the poet is ambivalent because that’s not what happened. He knows they saw great art, that she touched St. Teresa’s toe, and that he became enraged and asked her to please not touch the great art and she didn’t laugh and told him to go to hell. No, no lovemaking at the hotel.
You son of a bitch, the speaker of the poem calls the poet and the poet chuckles because they have the same mother, and he proceeds to write the speaker of the poem out of the poem so the voice is more distanced, more how the poet sounds after being away from her for a year, being away from Rome for two. The boulevard is still deserted and, given the male character in the poem couldn’t make morning love, being so eager to see great art, he decides to let the sun come out. The character is lost and overwhelmed by a city he will never see again and she grows more sympathetic, but when presented with St. Teresa’s toe she’s still going to touch it and that’s probably good for the poem and the poet, because the poet needs to have something outrageous occur and he’s glad for her, happy she kept her outrageousness, at least through Rome. Initially it’s what drew him to her and allowed him to show her his early sketches and manuscripts, though it’s what he eventually couldn’t stand and had to get away from because in the end life is serious and death more so—that’s why he favors poetry, because it’s august and melancholic and people go Mmmmm after he or someone else reads a good one.
This exercise has gone well. And in what better place than Rome? And what better than those two lovers filling that place? What better than him defending her from the guards? What better than this colossal lie, this poem?