And you search in the heat of Verona streets
for the word for shade. 

                                  *

Days begin in train stations, the search
for familiar accents. The story hooks my eye.
No doubt
someone actually remembers it –

the two-year-old swim celebrity,
five miles down the Mississippi
   at her father’s urging —
dead three years later. Her body’s
ruptures and contusions
a father’s final kiss. ‘Fifty years on.’
A trivia spot in Thursday’s Herald Tribune.
      A flashback of a life
in brief, from a newsstand in Firenze.
In class we learn the verb to want.

                                  *

(I learned something about volere
from her weak voice, playing Holly –
that shambling, piano ‘Moon River’.
                      You see, the stunned
forget to run, are caught all akimbo.
It’s what’s left –
                         the wanting.)