Junkyard 4, Week 1

Here in San Francesco’s town, the pigeons are fat, necks gleam purple as the clouds here in a morning storm, green as the twisting trees of Montelucco. Keys jammed to door lock. I’m not saying I want to break the perfect marble bodies of Bernini and his Roma, only that I want to press a pilgrim’s palm to your belly in rough stone.  You are the dimmed fresco cherub wings, fading to white stucco. Like bees, no one understands how those wings could lift you. Topple me in stone, ruin me because paradiso is boring and we know. All the pleasure is in ruins. Because the white marble has dissolved, finally, to red poppies and the tiny white-mouthed weeds and the stripped heads of dandelions. I am right now the naked head of the flower dumbly eyeing San Francesco’s mouth, wet with words claiming me as sister and Claire’s ruined fingers, still remembering the soft thread in the needle’s eye, and I too am dancing in stockings and prosecco on the bar of Café Artisti and the man with the belt in his hands, watching, and my friend’s feet marbling in sleep, in grass and sun and the thin air of the mountain and the foxing on the pages you are turning in Carrollton, Georgia. Red poppies like Matilde’s strawberry stained hands.