For Therese Markow

                                   
These new field binoculars, a gift, dating back to—
I’m drawing a blank, far too lavish to have come
From any candidates while dated just
The previous year; I wait until late
August to remove them from the rawhide
Leather case, amazed at their light-
Ness in light of their hefty exterior;
And now the seventh
Story rooftop atop the Ansche Chesed
Synagogue in plain sight from my windows
Aiming southwest a fraction over the horizon
I pick up my beautiful, slender, blond
Geneticist cousin on the lower
Left hand corner of the lens
In Metztitlan, Mexico and I am
Consumed by an envy so powerful
My face flushes colors I can’t see
Being chained to the city for reasons
Out of my control—when is she ever not on a field trip
Living an adventurer’s life
In search of the right genomic fruit fly—or heavenly stem cell?

I catch my breath and am spared from beating my fist against a
Rusted railing or breaking something
By holding the binoculars at waist level
And eying the elegant instrument with level gaze
When I am overcome with gratitude
That a nonelectronic optical instrument
Could have advanced to where I can see her
Walking alone
Across the immense square among the old stones,
Under the sky above the cathedral spire
That makes visible the invisible space of air
And then I wonder why the place is otherwise empty,
Empty except for whoever is holding the camera  
Probably as far back as they can move
Without toppling
Into the ravine.

Published in the Great River Review

There were abundant signs pointing in one direction:
the diamond merchant dead at the wheel of his car in his carriage house;
the diamond merchant’s wife—their name is Goldberg—
rolling into the street at the report of a pistol in the night;
the Bugatti’s lights jabbing at the fog as it roared through the dark winding streets
after the smugglers; the furtive, unfocused looks of the villagers,
the smell of rain, the squishy, mist-covered fields;
the svelte, electric murderess, who, having imbibed some poison falls
limply into Maigret’s arms, and Maigret,
as he awkwardly administers first aid, glimpses—
with his drooping eye and indirect yet hawklike gaze—
the betraying scar on her left breast, a clue to her less than
aristocratic origins.  The mystery is made more mysterious
by the absence of three reels, lost by one of the actors after the film was shot.
There’s only one still from the film in Bazin’s unfinished volume on Renoir:
in it there are six men and no women.
Bazin left no commentary on Night…, which needed him more
than all the others because it made its way into the world
maimed, distorted, involuntarily obscure.

I think it goes this way: Ray (Nicholas)
wanted Monty Clift to play Leith and Richard

Burton to play Brand.  A romantic match.
Not for each other but for Moira Shearer who Nick

(Ray) wanted for the part eventually played
“over his dead body” by Ruth Roman.

Ray wanted Shearer for the role of Brand’s wife
“innocent and very English,” but Graetz,

“a producer who hated directors,” signed
Ruth Roman who was neither

English nor innocent.
Clift mistakenly turned it down.

Ray’s next choice for Leith was Paul Newman.
Graetz turned it down.

He wanted Curt Jurgens, a name to conjure with
in Europe at the time despite his limited range:

bulging eyes, tightened mouth.
Jurgens was out of the question for Leith so they cast

him as Brand and Burton as Leith, which turned
the story on its head, shipwrecked any doubleness

in the jealousy theme to be drawn from two
similarly appealing and tormented leads,

since how could Roman not be drawn
to Burton?  How could she let Jurgens touch her?

Was Nick (Ray) bitter about the poisoning of his vision?
The cast was now all wrong, almost

counter to the director’s original conception.
Victory fell so far from the beauty of its conception.

The result?  Immemorial mess.
A bitter victory.

Maybe the art of direction is the art of taking a lot of shit.
And getting your own way out of it.

But as we rose from the café table in Trastevere
who could not help but notice
that it was as beautiful a day as could be imagined
in Rome: an early October afternoon in mid-July.

There’s little you can’t say against Rome,
from the infernal roar to the eternal siestas.
There are portents: the coppery-skinned woman
in the rusty dress with her hair still wet

at the bus stop at Largo Argentina;
message from Etruscan Central.
Italian cities are moody and capricious,
like a woman with a Pekinese on a wire coil we follow

to the cobbler and wait to replace a heel.
Minutes shy of siesta’s end.
A couple, antsy, peering through the smudge-
interred window where they can discern

a beaded purse on a rail, a pair of men’s
black shoes on a downward tilted shelf.
In the shop adjacent, a framer punches
a reproduction out of its gilded borders.

And in that dark and woody Furniture Repair
an apprentice, head down,
yellow rubber overalls,
matted black hair brushed forward, exits

while the old men recede
further and further into the dusty darkness.
No tone of lament.
What is there to begrudge?

The mid-afternoon light sweeps across the Tiber,
uncovering encrypted scrawls and encrusted designs
for an instant on the fortified banks—
then they’re gone.

I follow it—light that startles
a steep, circuitous street, so that each
rundown façade stands out in its first color.
The subdued tints blend in this instant:

rapture of lavender against aquamarine against ochre
against olive-gray against terra-cotta.
Masolini Masaccio Raphael.
Imponderable pale hues. Now broken.
Congestion. Stoplights. Con men.

But relief’s in sight, the Aventine
where you can breathe—
In the park, on the stage of a children’s theater,
kids are fencing with bright cardboard swords.

An old codger shakes a bitter, vituperative cane.
The righteous man.
Everyone shrugs, yeah, old people live in the past.
Under eerily clustered umbrella pines,

teens lounge cross-legged on the high parapets.
Backs to the city.
They’re not afraid.
They won’t fall.