You ask me, Marie-Amélie, am I the youth
who said goodbye last month?
To answer you
I’ll paint myself against this light, immersed in
your first words from home, tempered in the blaze of blue
and gold that is an April sky in Rome.
In my high-ceilinged room the window opens
on a crinkled map of roofs and parapets.
Swallows clip the sill. In their bright air
I thrive.
I ache to think of you – confined,
the Cast Room stove not lit since Easter,
among the plaster limbs the master favours – frozen
forms I’ve left behind.
Everything I see
if I go down to watch the market in the Campo
moves: knives and scales flash at fish stalls
decked with lemons, to the thrum of forge and stable,
fresh stone-dust loads loaves and cheeses, and a girl
in carmine slips into the shade beyond a column,
out of the flap of sun-bleached linen.
I own I’ve fallen
more than half in love with Romans. Young or old,
they hold themselves as proud as any figure in a frieze.
I’m hungry for the way a woman turns her head,
the telling language of a trader’s hand.
Alive or carved, they’re definite and grand,
even in the shadows of an alley, warm.