You Don’t Travel Light, Life
is a cumbersome business.
Your slight frame of five feet four,
a hundred and eight pounds
needs the support of many anchors,
like the bells on the feet of a medieval falcon
from the print in the Vatican’s gift shop
you saw on your first trip to Rome
after you had abandoned your tenure
to the bewilderment of colleagues.
Golden bells, masked as an adornment,
are fastened tightly to track the bird’s movements,
in case he ventures beyond the map’s crumpled corners
steering off the sky’s starry surface:
on the other side of the blue damask
seraphs are busy with housekeeping.
When angels roll the sky to take to the carpet cleaners,
together with the sun, moon, stars, and planets,
what’s left behind, what shape,
is it a square? rectangle? like the one
above your desk, from where
you moved my photo to the basement?
Wallpaper there is a deep sage color,
pristine, untarnished, not worn out
by sun and air and your daily greetings:
“good morning, love,” “good night, mon coeur,
je t’aime.”
Sometimes what is removed becomes
a perfect space for something else:
at fifty-four your breasts
were gone, and the remaining hollows
turned out to be a perfect match
to vessel mine,
we both were happy.
On the wrong side of the sky
the falcon’s golden bells are dull,
no tintinnabulation
is heard. Just endless silence.
It seems so easy, all one needs is rope.
And yet you choose to live,
your white shirt billows
like sails over the tight hull
of your black jeans.
You step on crumbling Roman stairs,
clutching tightly the framed print
of that falcon, one of many
provisions for the day, with which
you load your suitcase for the journey,
among them white t-shirts, one for each day,
jeans, blue and black, all washed and ironed,
the wholegrain pasta, organic sugar, olive oil,
Bach’s rescue remedy, for your immune protection:
all this cargo, requiring a day-to-day attention
takes the place of tiny perfect breasts.
