After a dream of Italy, I wander,
gaping unsweetly at a garden vine.
I should unpin and carry in the laundry
before it rains, but Italy unpins
time: a tendril roams in dopey motion,
a half an inch an hour, blind and slow,
unfurling towards a thing it doesn’t know
isn’t there. I sleep, I wake, I stare,
seeing, somehow, the Ponte Vecchio,
and seeing you, my susurrating satyr,
my incandescent glossolaliac,
seeing again your hieroglyphic face—
the rain unlocks its petrichor and patter—
the vine and I grow wild into space—