(3) Reportage (Week Two)

We change our tongues for a woman whose man changes her tongue for

texture—to test and taste the English of her lines on a page. They’re in love,

I know. Taken to his Rome, to his botany of Italian translations. She’s read us

from bar-napkins and form. I should tell her this all sounds a little supple

for poems about stages of perfume and a nine syllable word for latch. Out

the window a man waits on a bent leg—I imagine years of tread and trek on

uneven cobblestone makes for the uneven of day-to-day. Like last night,

after dinner, after the others went to quiz the legs of two bottles of wine, we

stole out to skirts of Spoleto—a lost spot, empty and closer to her castle than

any refrain of ruin. I wanted to write you out of the romance, out of the waltz

we made with a little less than your songs on my phone. I swear I’m not a fan-girl.

Later, you said my eyes seem green, not their usual grey—then you were an isthmus 

on my tongue, the difficulty of lips for verbs in another language. And I wished

we’d let things crumble the same way back home.