In The Poetry

What He Thought

We were supposed to do a job in Italy
and, full of our feeling for ourselves,

our sense of being
Poets from America, we went

from Rome to Fano, met the mayor,

posed for the photographers and served
on panels (“What does it mean, ‘flat drink’?” asked someone.
“What does it mean, ‘cheap date’?”.)
Among Italian literati

we could recognize our counterparts –
the academic, the apologist,
the arrogant, the amorous,

the brazen and the glib – and there was one

administrator (the conservative) in suit

of regulation gray who like a good tour guide

with measured pace and uninflected tone narrated

sights and histories the hired van hauled us past.
Of all, he was most politic, and least poetic,

so it seemed. Our last few days in Rome,
(when all but three of the New World Bards had flown)
I found a book of poems this

unprepossessing one had written. It was there
in the pensione room (a room he’d recommended)
where it must have been abandoned by

the German visitor (was there a bus of them?)
to whom he had inscribed and dated it a month before.
I couldn’t read Italian either, so I put the book
back in the wardrobe’s dark. We last Americans

were due to leave tomorrow. For our parting evening then
our host chose something in a family restaurant, and
there we sat and chatted, sat and chewed
till, sensible it was our last

big chance to be poetic, make

our mark one of us asked

“What’s poetry?

Is it the fruits and vegetables and

marketplace of Campo dei Fiori? Or

the statue there?” Because I was

the glib one, I identified the answer

instantly, I didn’t have to think – “The truth
is both, it’s both!” I blurted out. But that

was easy. That was easiest to say. What followed

taught me something about difficulty,

for our underestimated host spoke out,

all of a sudden, with a rising passion, and he said:

That statue represents Giordano Bruno,

brought to be burned in the public square
because of his offense against
authority, which was to say
the Church. His crime was his belief

the universe does not revolve around

the human being: God is no
fixed point or central government, but rather is

poured in waves through all things. All things
move. ‘If God is not the soul itself, He is

the soul of the soul of the world.’ Such was

his heresy. The day they brought him

forth to die, they feared he might
incite the crowd (the man was famous

for his eloquence). And so his captors

placed upon his face
an iron mask, in which

he could not speak. That is

how they burned him. That is how

he died, without a word, in front

of everyone.
And poetry –
(we’d all
put down our forks by now, to listen to

the man in gray; he went on
softly) –
poetry is what

he thought but did not say.