Dither and Zither
Though I am rusty, once again I am thinking
and making an effort at scrawling
so my thoughts arrive like a glass of water
and so my spirit hangs just above you like a branch
in a secret garden you stumbled upon after looking
at your sad investments. It is May 20th,
a Monday, and I am thinking of Saint Francis and Giotto,
whose frescoes helped mold a useable philosophy
for those who believe in kitchenware and days of cellphones,
and I am thinking about a postcard sent once from Matthew
of St. Francis receiving the stigmata, a Van Eyck,
and not a Giotto. I don’t recall what he wrote, though
I remember feeling delighted by its short message
which like poetry stayed with me throughout the day.
Earlier today in the city of Assisi, the light was the color
of a peach and I could see myself in a movie,
standing in the Piazza Ruffino thinking of Didi,
and all the postcards I purchased sitting on my desk
alongside the empty journals and wanting to avoid
the banality of touristic observations
and wanting desperately to cheer her up with messages
of loneliness leading me to fill my luggage days before departure
from this land of tawny owls and black locust trees
because I’ve been feeling blue and my foot aches
and sometimes thinking means marrying poverty
and her dress of patched rags, like St. Francis, but
then you learn to talk to the birds, which is an exalted
form of thinking, year after year of dialing into heaven.
