Nato e Morto

My Italian is a pocketful
of leftover euros. I use them up,
requesting return vaporetto tickets
to the island cemetery of San Michele.

The bigliettaio assures us that
it’s too soon to take the one-way trip.
Out on the breezy green lagoon, my mother
does her trick with shades and scarf that cuts

her age in half and has waiters mistake us
for husband and wife. The low-lying isle
of the dead drifts towards us.
Once through the portal we find celebrity slabs:

Stravinsky and Diaghilev, Pound obscured
by petals and dust. I place a pebble
on Brodsky’s stone, add a biro to the bristling
jar at its base. He’ll not be short of a pen

when new ideas come. But we’re not here
for photo-ops or grave rubbings.
We came to mingle with the Catholic mass,
to walk where the locals serry,

In Bocca al Lupo

 

The airport has closed, the trains are frozen
        to their tracks, the Alps cold shoulder me and drop

a winter’s weight of snow into my lap. With my grappa headache
        I lounge on grammar books, flicking channels

and finding a rare programme free of hot pants, toupees,
        wet t-shirts. On a map of old Europe I watch the habitats

of the grey wolf shrink. Shot, poisoned, built
        out of existence and fucking up its DNA with the feral strays

of the towns padding into the countryside.
        Mist bristles its coat against the French windows

and I’m off again, making a little sleep
        to while away this time away from you while

Apologia

 

She rarely felt the need to apologise.
When she did, her contrition met with
exonerating pouts, enveloping hugs,
the nipping in the bud of any grudge.
I tried apologising to her once
after one of my turns, full of Armagnac,
spinning off the comet tail of Seroxat
or some such serotonin-shooting star.
No fear. Wouldn’t budge. Got nothing.
Email after email, Interfloral
interventions, quarter-hourly texts;
she would not forgive or forget. So,
her larynx remains bruised, her dining table
smashed, her kitten’s head the wrong way round.
 

Fitting

Traditionally, men will sit nearby in leather seats
or, in cheaper boutiques, on office surplus chairs.
Maybe flipping through Men’s Health or FHM
while wives and girlfriends try things on, with dutiful assistants
pinning hems or sighing Saturday girls clattering hangers
back on racks, snarling with rolling eyes that “There’s a queue.”
But I pick my angle through the door of the changing room
to watch your naked feet rehearse the dance of sliding in and out
of pants and dresses, shoes and blouses, garments slipping up and down
with now and then a little show-and-tell as you yank the curtain,
reveal with a frown a tightly-waisted purple gown
then back again to just the feet, the turning ankles, balancing acts,
as you crane your neck to see how this or that looks from the back
and even if these things are chosen more with him in mind than me,