Right there, right there between the fountain curling toward the sky in bends of stone and a trashcan glistening with empty beer bottles, is where I said scusi for the first time and he didn't respond, just locked feet straight ahead--his desire, a Modern Love class taught me--and sloped his attention down, toward the German restaurant with Italian translations. Beside Zeppelin, where a woman slid my fifty cents across the counter grease, refusing my money, a man stood in Greek lettering, patterned by previous tourism. I bought that shirt, too, five years ago in a shop that looked up at the acropolis. Since, I've forgotten the translation. I thought, I should ask him, should bridge all of this together, but I speak English and he speaks Italian, and together how do we translate ancient Greek? We fall into squares here. The city slopes down, always down, and my writing sucks. I've got nothing. Why isn't this my triggering town? I like it too much. It's exactly what I expected, what I wanted. You can't widen roads in Rome. You're dealing with history. Italian is the vulgar in Latin picked out, split open, spliced back together with monuments and need. Let's go to Monteluco, at night, alone, and find Hell.
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