It wasn’t what I’d expected when I saw
the address Marco had written on the flyleaf
in my copy of Montale’s The Storm (it really was)
just before we left his brother’s bar next door
to a vacant dry-cleaning place on Broome Street
as he said You’ve got to check in on her for me
you’ve got to see how she’s doing—you’ve
got to see if she’s alive & I swore it would be
the first thing I’d do when I got back to Rome that
I wouldn’t let a day pass before I’d go & see
Giulietta & that I’d call him right away to reassure
him those needles she’d loved hadn’t lifted her
into some purgatorial silence & Marco was still
staring at me & saying nothing at all until just
a quick I know you will & it was only a few weeks
later I was back in Trastevere at Raphael’s when
Giulietta entered the party as if dressed in layers
of silk & frost drawing every eye in the room to her
faux jaguar jacket hanging off bare shoulders & I saw
it wasn’t an entrance so much as an accusation
aimed at the conversations in that room including
the one I’d been having about the movement of
the triangle in Kandinsky & its delicate mystical
agency with a Benedictine monk visiting Rome
from a high desert monastery at Valyermo where
I’d walked the Stations of the Cross one Good Friday
of a very bad year & now Raphael’s party for our New
Year of more brutal fears had us all a little edgy with late
resolutions meant to resonate across a next world war
& soothe those nightmares awaiting us even though we
knew the truth was simply that nobody saved anybody
just as I’d never save Giulietta & love fades to noir in
every mercury mirror & all in all I think I was relieved
to see her coming over to me rings chiming a wine glass
as she moved next to me to say & so I see I’m just in time