“What modern movies lack is the wind in the trees.”
                     —D.W. Griffith

Dear one, I’m answering you in this way because I don’t think you’d have liked
the first response that came to my head if you weren’t familiar with the works.

I thought to say, and thought better of saying it, that your letter is right
out of a book I love, Among Women Only, and the movie Antonioni

made from it Le Amiche:The Girlfriends. The women are even in a business
somewhat similar to your own, fashion-design-art. The night you describe

could have been lifted from the scenes where Rosetta, the odd
woman out, looks so alone among the other women only some

of whom are far crueler thoughtless senseless and insensitive
than the somewhat dunderheaded men who flail through A’s oeuvre.

That their weapons are words—some rarely stop to breathe—
makes them no less lethal. Their banter is never anything less

than treacherous. It’s not a man who feels alone among these women,
it’s a woman, “no longer a woman,” as the gravediggers say;

the second time around she succeeds, drowns
herself and enters a select—company. The only difference between

Rosetta’s suicide and Virginia Woolf’s is that the former exists only on page and
screen (to say nothing of my memory, so
seduced by the magic of the presentation, it fails, it forgets, to separate

the real suicides from the pretend). In this case. Among
Women Only. Tra Donna Sola. Le Amiche. The Girlfriends.

The titles as drenched with portent as the sudden booming gusts
in mid-ocean that rattle the shutters with a vicious prattle of sprays,

confirming the off-the-charts shifts in barometric pressure
neither captain, crew, nor engines, is equipped to endure.

But the writer, Cesare Pavese, and the director, Michelangelo Antonioni,
weren’t pretending. There was nothing pretend about Pavese’s suicide

in his room in the Albergo Roma in Turin, following
in his heroine’s wake after being awarded the Strega Prize for this novel

whose title the director pointedly revised,
to bring it down a notch and closer to—corruption.

                    ...

For reasons I don’t remember the lovers don’t meet at the appointed place.
But someone else, that is, something else shows up: the camera—

the water moves like thirst through the gutters,
the water that repeatedly flows through the gutters like a rivulet.

The first thing she sees when she draws open the curtains as dawn
breaks, a structure that assumed the shape of a mushroom cloud—

a marked absence of human presence in the geometrical streets;
a triumph of Fascist architecture left over from the war—

after it registered the deathly vibration.
So much for outer space being far away.

                    ...

The only one awake at the desolate dark hour it chose to land was a drunk
who hijacked Piero’s Alpha Romeo and, distracted by something unfamiliar and bright

in the night sky, veered and ended deep in the Olympic lake that wasn’t there
the last time he looked. Too late. Frogmen from the crew descend

and through the murk discern two headlights
still burning, still gleaming as the car clears the water.

                    ...

Everything she looks at takes on life, the umbrella pines
never more beautiful than now;

and under her eyes they fill
like sails after an interminable lull

with the wind rushing through them to keep time with the fair-haired woman
who, having come through the coruscating night-long quarrel on top,

exhales an exhilaration that widens avenues and parts congestion, armed with mere
awareness. Not even the crowd at the stock exchange can put a hitch in her stride,

nor the rendezvous with her mother
and the avaricious lingo that infests, infects.

A translator by profession, she’s free to observe.
And seizes the chance to track a big-time loser to his lair

where he orders a tranquilizer, pours it into an unclouded glass,
and proceeds mechanically to a lunch place where no one

could divine his misfortune.
She’s learning what she needs to relearn.

Somebody else can translate her ex-lover’s novel.

                    ...

How many people can stake a claim on one woman?
There’s only so much time. And everything she does

I wish she would do over again with identical attention,
since I cannot encompass the changeable,

fleet expressions aimed at no one, yet available.
Her rapture when the propeller plane enters

the nimbus clouds, lit from inside.
Her astonished gaze when the white,

unearthly flagpoles rattle on a bridge at night.
How rapid her acceptance of another man within

hours after she’s loosed from her longtime lover.

                    ...

No one, nothing, has been more patient than the shadows.
What a solid impression they make on the jagged, roughened,

broken-down stone walls and smooth, stark verticals
that grew alongside her, curtailed while she developed—

maintaining disorder against sterile acceptance
where the question that function is the highest

order is no longer a question, but a way
of life oiling passage through this world.

Their achievements swept away by the brand that stuck: Fascist.
Many wish Socrates were alive to ask, “Then were all Fascists bad?

And if so, were all who opposed them—good?”
In his heavenly messages, the great Fascist poet D’Annunzio

addresses twenty-first century man, “If you’d gone our way,
you would have more time for poetry.

Now, my friends, you’re as endangered as me,
but you’d rather live in denial than own up to your discontent.”

Night falls. Rain falls. Water pours from a hole in a barrel,
leaves a trail I would follow, past the happy, shrieking

children to the source
of their delight: a sprinkler

which an impervious time-clock attendant
instantly shuts off; and the wire

fences dissolve for the woman to pass through as she
proceeds resolutely

from what will never be, to what is—

                    ...

How often I’ve wished some revival house would screen The Eclipse
on a day when I wasn’t in another state.