Why does everything seems so impossible
in the middle of the night? I wake up at three
with my mind in a knot, and I might as well be Incan,
the ancient people of Peru, whose language
was not written in characters like the Chinese
or letters like the Greeks and Romans or even runes
like the Celts, but knots on a string, so maybe when the Incans
woke up at three, they could feel their knots,
whereas all I can do is review my worries or recite the poems
I've memorized, a couple of sonnets by Shakespeare
and Donne, Hamlet's “What a piece of work is a man” speech
and all the lyrics to Highway 61 Revisited, my favorite being
“Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues,” because when the lights
are out you might as well be lost in the rain in Juárez,
and sometimes I forget how uncooperative the material world
can be, though at moments all the pieces fit
like a Byzantine mosaic, which I'm thinking about now
because I'm going to Ravenna tomorrow,
and I can't sleep because the Piazza Sant'Ambrogio,
which is right outside my bedroom window,
has become a late night hangout for braying drunks—God,
the lungs on those people—and I can't help but think
of all my mistakes as they line up like the bloody crucifixions
I've been seeing in Italy this spring,
though the sky has been a glorious Leonardo blue, and the names
of the artists, how could you not be great with a name
like Duccio di Buoninsegna, and you'd have to go a long way
to find a better name than Dosso Dossi, so toss and turn
as I may, it is not Eastertime, but the beginning of June,
and it was Luis Buňuel who said, Thank God
I'm an atheist, though my Bulgarian student Polina
says that God is in other people, and it's hard
not to believe in other people since there are so many of them,
their screams bouncing off the Renaissance walls
of Sant'Ambrogio and into my window, and my train leaves
at 7:30, and what if my mother has a stroke,
and there's no one there to help her, and all my cats line up
and list my betrayals: Annabelle, Sylvia Wilberforce,
Little Latin Loopy Lulu, and Bucky, aka Mr. Suit Pants,
Mr. Crazy Bacon, Mr. Pretty Paws, and I hope
he's in a paradise where lost tails are sewn back on
and torn ears mended, because I've had it up to here
with the everyday scarring, the laundry, the dust, so I might as well
be asleep and dreaming of the tomb of Galla Placidia in Ravenna,
the night sky made of thousands of pieces of colored tesserae,
or facing a tidal wave in a South American town
or riding a bus when a fat man in tighty-whities and a black
T-shirt gets on and starts shooting, blood flying
everywhere, but soon he's bored by the mayhem and sits down
beside me and asks what I am doing. Moving to keep
his bloody arm away from my white dress, I say, “Reading
a newspaper.” “What's that?” he asks. “It's where
you read about what happened the day before.” “Read,”
he says, so I tell him about all the terrible
things people did yesterday in buses all over the world.