April 20 – from Piazzale Michelangelo

from the nape of the city
i tap the vanished days
scoop the Dome’s hollow parts
shedding from towers
pigeon and swallow
skim lower
edifice, geometry
etched and sketched and photographed
without relent
it should be flash-faded
though it glows as ever
caught in the traces of my fiction
i want to know every particle
the lives they return to each night
the loyalties, the accidents
the ones
from before
who stayed here
to form the sediment of ghosts