The Sketchbook

Let’s begin with these scales
Of gold light riding a script of leaves
& ferns twisting along
The antique boulevard as it
Swings suddenly to pass below
The old palazzi
Stacked up against the hillside
Red tiles lit by late afternoon sun
The blond & amber stones
Trembling almost shifting a little
In the heat & glare as
The boulevard angles off again
This time down to the beach & rocks
& sea beginning to rustle
Just as the tides come in to brush
The hunched shoulders of the seawall
Along the strand of white sands
Where he paused to pick up a stone
The size of a marble & shaped like
An egg
Its base green as kelp yet
Veined with an electric yellow & at
Its bald tip a ridge of rose not
Scarlet but the dull red
Of clay ran marking the randomness
Of stone
Even this one she’d drawn
In her sketchbook after they’d walked
Out that afternoon along the seawall
To an abandoned
Lighthouse — a dead heron sprawling
Across the flagstones of the path —
& in her
Sketchbook she caught its exact collapse
Paying precise attention to broken
Feathers as they fell
So awkwardly across each other or
Stood singly in gusting Mediterranean
Winds & on that same page as
The stone she’d once
Begun a sketch of him leaning
Above the heron & with a stick lifting
One wing as
A cloud of penny-colored flies ascended
Out of the bird’s open breast rising
Quietly & gathering
Around him like his own shadow
In the last light of the still waning Sicilian
Summer sun & it was then
He recalled the day at a small papeterie
Off Rue de Cardinal Lemoine
Its violet awning & its front window filled
With an extravagant display of
Marbled Florentine
Endpapers fanned out against
A dove-gray cloth like a spread peacock’s
Tail & it was there he’d bought her
The sketchbook its cover a deep red
The patient
Shade of blood one sees
Only on a butcher’s apron at day’s end
& this sketchbook
Became the single thing they
Shared each day outside of speech
This daybook of occasions they’d handed
Back & forth across
The table or bed each of them leaving
For the other drawings & notes
& overheard asides to be discovered
By the one
& the sketchbook slowly filled with
Pencil shadows & a pen’s
Smudges & spiraling charcoal hieroglyphs
& fragments of stories — lines of
Interrupted lyrics or letters begun on
One page one day to be
Completed days later on another whole
Passages describing
Miniature parks or town squares
& stone towers or meadows & those
Meandering walks
Along the broken bricks of an ancient
Destitute & serene walled city or
The prospects of a mustard-lit countryside
& those urban grids & her vertical
Series
Of brown & violet
Ink drawings of a blank & derelict
Renault factory & its ruined collapsing
Steel presses —
& then one night
She entered into her old dream of
That childhood canal leading north forever
As it silently froze as
She the swimmer of the dream grew
Minute scales of
Ice upon her eyes & her lids closed
As the sky hunched above her like Cerberus
Asking Where are you going now
No one else has ever gone? — & that next
Morning the patchwork paisley
Gypsy duffle already packed & awaiting
Her by the hotel room door she
Looked up just as he
Placed a small white espresso cup
Before her on the wood table
As empty as the page beneath her hand