Elegy

“Even Duccio can’t match

Giotto’s stage management of great tragedy”:

Transgendered Professor Y. in leather miniskirt

paces before the screen, wood pointer

scraping saint faces, slapping

hunched women of the Lamentation.

Blue-gold tumult of the chapel walls.

After-lunch lecture hall heat.

You’re in that class with me. We go on

from there—not long. You do The Waste Land

in different voices—Come in under the shadow

of this red rock—Strom Thurmond, Aussie

bartender, Cantonese. HURRY UP PLEASE

ITS TIME. Twenty years later,

I get your news by Facebook update,

three hundred characters or less,

waiting for the Scrovegni to open

in the windy square across from

Donatello’s horse and rider,

dust flecks foaming past fetlocks

and stirrups. You’re someone I slept with

long ago, stopped, pitied, forgot.

Some remember the Berlin Wall,

some remember Vietnam or the first Gulf War,

I don’t remember you except standing

by my chair in the smelly bedroom,

blue sheets undone. You scrub at your head

wet from the shower, drop the towel

on the floor. You ice my earlobe, light a match

to sterilize the needle: Give me a small red new potato,

you say. Kev pierced my ear with a needle and potato.

when I came in, 3am, and saw the blood...You jab.

No pain. A tearing through resistance,

tissues numbly separating. You do your mom: