Erick Verran

Ask me, chatty, gap-toothed muse,

about April on the Italian peninsula.

Truth be told, soon enough

one becomes used to beauty, yawning

at ideal mountains, waking up

to a Windows ’95 desktop. As though

nature were capable of exaggerating.



I’d binged, just completely last-minute,

a Rick Steves playlist, hundreds of clips

in total, on the history of artichoke

or a winemaking dynasty

whose chianti cools in tombs abandoned

long ago by the Etruscans—bottled

to dust in their coffins of marble.



Waiting at the gate for my red eye

strapped into canvas and leather,

I wasn’t yet bloodshot but exhausted

with anticipating this trip,

a tour of the central and northern areas,

sure to be grand; there, elevators

have a zeroth floor, such that one



may be claustrophobically nowhere,

suspended by a thread of braided cable

over a basement, that Miltonic lower deep.

Husbands with their midday brandies

clink glasses and slap dominoes,

inquiring about one another’s wives

who call these men, what else, but love?



The faithless Roman snow, it seldom

lands except as rain. Umbrella men

emerge, seemingly out of the humid air.

Boulevards alight; dead gladiators

stand in lines, waiting to buy gelato

with copper money. And ear-budded nuns

follow the whisper of their miked guide.



South of Florence, in a Smart convertible

reminiscent of a Fisher-Price coupe,

claws of trees hacked at the knuckles

beg for admittance—something

out of Wuthering Heights. So the highway,

flanked by yellow, Tuscan weeds,

maybe itself wind-slanted, terminates



in farms; the car is a fuel-efficient arrow.

Country digs—absurdly spacious,

with free-range geese and kids—suffice

for the weekend. The bathroom’s every inch

is eerily Barbie, while a macramé Virgin

framed on rose paper guards my bed.

Almost holy, the outlines of her eyes



in their frozen wakefulness. I drive us

from hilly San Gimignano to the commune

of Volterra, with its flag-throwers

and obsession for pressed bread,

snaking toward d’Orcia, Montepulciano . . .

fairytale locales that survive to offer

a whiff of the medieval. Here and there



old rumors about a jailed philosopher

or a polymathic German author

dot the shops, according to blue plaques

fired in a language I cannot read.

All the shaved ham, laid waveform

on a wooden board, traditional alcohols

and break-away slab chocolate,



an Olympus of tagliatelle: I, gourmand—

mildly hedonist, a dilettante eater.

The train pulls in like an anaconda

with a fantastic paint job, a kind

of sparkling thought. (On and on like this,

in praise of transportation and lunch

as much as the luxury of finding oneself



bored of Europe.) In Bologna, elbowing

the bedspread, a red-and-black nebula,

my inattention saccades from video

to idiotic video: stand-up comedy,

a Nietzschean abyss of memes. The CEO

of a haunted trolley-bus company

sends me a like and asks what it is I do.



An ill-tempered radiator is hissing

in the corner, a thick dribbling of latex

hung beneath like a beaded hem.

Biscuits and suspicious fruit cups stale.

I gulp a probiotic with hot coffee

and soak my always cold feet in the bidet

(on the floor, a fresh caulking gun



and extra washers); from that ceramic

perch I savor a British paperback

on my Kindle, its provincialism quiet,

until I am convinced the bowl’s warmth

will have a measure of permanence.

Then I towel off, pink and steaming,

like one of Inferno’s entry-level sinners.



Masturbating in the osteria. Sipping

grappa on a date. Stuck in one costly

pulpit after another, no air-conditioning,

eating mostly pasta. From amaro,

they claim, a writer succumbs

to fernet’s sorcery, that directly herbal

spirit of rhubarb, aloe, and myrrh.



The punishment is Freudian, of course,

to wind up in Umbria sharing Airbnbs

with one’s mother (Christ, who dislikes

wine!), round-trip in and out of the capital

and soloing it thereafter. A month,

roughly, which has for its culmination

bunking in Lombardy with gap-yearers.



That loop’s cold apolune, threatened

by the tide and cruise ships, boils down

to her hand luggage click-clacking

and a big Guggenheim tote—hard wedge

of parmesan, souvenirs in newspaper—

digging into my shoulder. A crow taps

at a crust of pizza; the harsh surf



girds its oysterish city. A profile of Joseph

Brodsky, cut into a gray estate marker,

faces the cemetery: Arnold Böcklin’s Isle

of the Dead, with its dark cypresses?

I haggle for a vintage tin of cinnamon

lozenges and a gondolier’s fero (a hunk

of metal, now in the mezcal glass



I bought in Oaxaca). That lapidary fog.

The architecture hurts to look at,

to picture it sunk once and for all.

Orphaned, as it were. The Frecciarossa

leaves for Campania, the nation’s shin;

hundreds of kilometers simply to hate

Naples—its urinary tang and smell



of killed fish, the Vespas’ incessant

beeping—calculating the cost of lodging

anywhere else, far from Styrofoam cubes

of mussels and shrimp. I contemplate

in daydreams walking to Capri and listing

into Vesuvius. But then I’m bound

for Pompeii, a clique of Adidas tracksuits



loudening the carriage (Archimedean

displacement for noisy, pig-eared boys).

Near the archeological park, some

wait in tanks and almond sunglasses.

A one-man juicery blasts Tupac.

After twenty centuries, Pompeii’s homes

flourish with yew and oleander.



Poppies, watched over by a colossus

of green bronze, jostle in the spring air.

Atop the promontory, where they hide

the restrooms and new cafeteria,

a handsome student filches the Winstons

from his fanny pack, begins smoking.

Cats hunt sandwich meat. House



of Jupiter, House of the Tragic Poet.

My peppermint breath contributes

to its second ruin. Amalfi, whose sailors

heard of scurvy, shelters under tarps

an embarrassment of lemons, each limb

heavy with them; basketed, monster

citruses, as pockmarked as Auden,



sell in front of gift shops. They named

a garden in Ravello after a comment

by Wagner. From the terrace, I glimpse

a bit of the Pacific, blue as fluorite:

Erchie’s single windsurfer traces

a figure eight for hours, and the elderly

socialize inside a roadside chapel.



The tower, a chalky cropping of sea rock

being its nest—like an abandoned

sand castle—lords over Cetara, a dog

and CAVE CANEM (the famous mosaic)

fastened to its door. On a municipal sign,

one finds a note about Orson Welles,

how a certain mise-en-scène was shot,



etcetera. The sudden choreographing

of a coach line as Vietri’s police whistle

and semaphore. Motorists idle. By night,

basking in front of the quartz heater’s

orange radiance, I mix sour toddies

out of herbal tea and nips of bourbon.

From the upper cul-de-sac of Raito,



like a good bard I lose whole mornings

staring out across what the internet

says is the Tyrrhenian Sea. The boardwalk

where I lolled plotlessly wanting romance,

a change one might characterize as luck,

is a distant splinter. Two white-haired

pensioners drift by unbothered in an Alfa



Romeo. Finally, I need to slingshot Salerno

to a Milanese hostel. Over breakfast

a Swedish scientist with a lisp entrusts us

with a quest: letters to be hand-delivered,

mine for a Verona couple. At the refectory

I study the loss of Jesus’s feet

in The Last Supper. It is perfectly Christian,



or American: the washer of extremities

has his own amputated. Around vespers,

I order a mediocre “BEST RISOTTO”

admire the cathedral’s crusty, white spires

and the glassed-in fashion brands

arcades hide. Poplars sperm the square

with hairy parachutes, which blond tots



on the cusp of pubescence race to catch.

That day, I took the regional to Genoa,

hometown of Columbus; I’d long wanted

to go, for no reason I recall. The couple

with their matching windbreakers

and Vibram shoes, a passenger in skintight

corduroy the color of a dirty plum,



and you, whom I swilled lots of asinello

with and taught to play table tennis.

Don’t I remember other things? Il Sentiero

dei Limoni out of Maiori and the woman

who made me try her marmalade;

a Moses of solid onyx holding God’s laws,

like newborn twins, in a family crypt.



At Malpensa, airport of bad thoughts—

thumbing my passport’s important,

laminated page, a blood-stained kerchief

in my back pocket—a frog-eyed man

begs to jump ahead to the kiosks beyond

(for duty-free Juul, a boxed Laphroaig

or Johnnie Walker? Like they’re bartered,



unbeknownst to any government).

Hypnotic, an immensity’s slow crawl:

the Swiss alps, crinkled as a black napkin

tossed over with salt, and at cruising

altitude the gaseous, blue focaccia

of clouds. Our Boeing lands to applause,

and then laughter at the applause.

Erick Verran is the author of Obiter Dicta (Punctum Books, 2021) and a PhD candidate at the University of Utah. His writing is forthcoming or has appeared in the American Poetry Review, the Georgia Review, Literary Matters, Gulf Coast, Nimrod, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Salt Lake City.