The Italian police stopped us today
as I passed a tiny Fiat on the road
from Perugia to Umbertide.
They were behind a few cypress trees
and I couldn’t see them in my hurry
to beat home the storm over Firenze.
They told me I passed over an unbroken line,
although, standing there, I did find a small space
near where we stood and tried to make my case,
but we all smiled—the Italian workmen
had run out of paint that day, it was their mistake
although I would have passed anyway
and the two thousand lire it cost me
can’t buy decent pasta anymore. The air
was stopped and it darkened over Tuscany.
We drove on into the storm and beat it home
as I knew we would, past the guinea fowl
and geese in our village of Polgeto,
and soon the rain began to fall, large drops
at first raising the dust, then gluing it down,
then filling the water tanks of Umbria.
The peasants sitting outside Polgeto’s shops
stopped talking a while, and the tree insects
too stopped their chirrs, as if to acknowledge
the storm. And then they started up again.
I awaited this beginning-nothing
is plain when heard again after silence.
I wanted to say more, how a storm registers
on the stony faces of the men outside
the alimentari, the insects’ shutdown.
What will survive, remembering all this,
is something else, not the police or the rain
or the skies building up over the north,
but how out of the daily incidents
we find the distance not too long to go,
that we can go that distance, and continue on.
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