“It was a day as noir as night.” My own favorite line recently, rescued
From a notebook I’ve been tossing from jacket to suitcase to shoulder bag. Today
I am movement & simply all about movement & travel. In fact, I am moving
At this very moment on the rapido between Rome & Florence, & don’t you
Find that in & of itself terribly, well, moving? I mean, the thought of me
Writing to you, writing this, moving here through this cinemagraphic journal
Of the soul, since that’s how I think of this work, how it’s lit by silence
& by pain—“the cinematography of the soul.” Another not-so-bad line, eh? You
Tell me what makes this tolerable, you know, the pretention & arrogance
Of somebody announcing he’s writing to you “on the rapido between Rome
& Florence,” & in fact the only thing that makes it tolerable at all is knowing
This poem has nothing to do with Italy, nothing at all; though as you know, if
You know shit about me, or ever cared to, Italy is where my heart is (sappy, true,
& more exactly Rome is where my heart is; Florence, my mind & imagination;
& don’t forget Venice, that murky soup of dreams…), it’s that simple. No, this
Is a poem entirely about death, hmmm, about murder really. Death by murder,
Murder as the stage of rage, the passionate articulation of envy, desire, jealousy,
Despair, & cool calculation. Yet this is also a poem about style, attitude, blazing
Panache, & white-hot courage. Puzzled yet? You should be. Because quite quickly
This is becoming a poem about my dead father & his own passion for the mystery
Novels of Chandler & Hammett, his favorite noir flicks of the Forties, & oh
Yeah, those S. S. Van Dine books he treasured, all that elegance a model
For me in adolescence (think of it: Van Dine, right there alongside prancing
Jim Morrison—go figure). It was the smoky atmospheres of sex & mystery
That stuck with me, from Bogart in The Big Sleep or The Maltese Falcon,*
Or Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past, all of those guys
Too cool for school, all of them beat up & grown-up, wiser & older than
God himself, & even Elliott Gould in the Altman version of The Long Goodbye,
His clothes studiously slept in, made my father laugh out loud
Each time he said, looking sideways as he scraped a match along a stucco wall,
Amazed at some new absurdity in the world, “It’s OK with me….” So life
Lived, my father taught me, is life darkened at the edges & made therefore
More luminous at its heart. As I move now so roughly into this late & deeply
Mysterious adulthood, jagged & reckless, cautious & desperate, so much of
My past life murdered in its bed, I sometimes want to be nothing,
Nothing but movement, nothing but motion, the arc of departure moving away
From people & things & places. I need a little more of that tough guy, kiss-my-
Ass nonchalance these days just to get by. That’s what I think. All motion,
All moving away, away, just fucking away…even as the train keeps moving
Farther from Rome, yet always closer, closer to Florence.