Che Fai Di Bello
They are burning the fields in
Assisi, unearthing tartufi from beneath Umbrian oaks
for the umpteenth time. So slow
they don’t even shuffle, black
and swelling, tartufi think
only of roots, just as the Islamic call
to prayer, adhān, is at the root
of the word permit, as in let someone
hear these words, for which
they will also need udun, the word
for ear. All summer
the hornworm curves forward
like summer—San Marzano, Brandywine, Sweet
Million, Jaune Flammeé—consuming its own
path while the white larvae of the wasp
cling to its back like saddlebags or unweaned
possums. The lily of
the valley, too, lifts white stones overhead,
climbing its green ladder
like Jacob’s Ladder at the gym, which we continue to
climb though never any higher, the way
St. Catherine’s head lifts forever
a half-step on the white marble slab
where she lies in Santa Maria sopra
Minerva, curls of stone enclosing
pink commas that held what she no longer
hears. And because she cannot speak
in Giovanni di Paolo’s painting, she holds out
her heart to Christ in order
to exchange it for his, a handful of red
in tempera and gold on wood:
Che fai di bello oggi, What are you doing
today, Italians ask when they meet
on the streets of Rome, What do you make
of the beautiful? Although
they’re dead, the damned can see the open
notes of the white-throated
sparrow notching the air like a pulse: the way
his throat moves, they say
of Dante, this one must be alive. It lay in the rain
this morning, across new
asphalt, a duller spot, cluster of dust the size
of a mouse I might not
have seen except for the pink ear, the sound
it made in my mind.
