Half parking lot, half town square. Cobblestones, pavement, and wet bricks. Clouds gather in a puddle in the middle of the piazza. Next to the cathedral there’s a pizzeria, but it’s closed. Are you the speaker? Your mouth, I notice, is made of stone. Where did all of the living go? There are no people here, only pigeons and a man selling newspapers in a language I can’t read. I’m happy, though, not to receive news of my death.
*
I came by train, slept through mountains, rivers, towns, and woke to find myself clandestine in a city of asylum. My papers I lost in the rain. Your number I dialed by accident. I wait for you in the square, beside the statue of Boccaccio. Author of The Decameron, poet of the vernacular, friend of Petrarch, here giant, life-like, and composed in stone. Born illegitimate, mother unknown, the details of his birth are sketchy. Of his death more is known: he spent the last thirteen years of his life in Certaldo, obesity, dropsy, disappointment, bitterness, and died here in 1375.
*
The Plague devastated surrounding cities like Pisa, Siena, Florence, some with nearly all their inhabitants wiped out. Out of respect and fear, neighbors extracted the bodies of dead neighbors from their houses and left their corpses lying out on their front doors. A group of seven young women and three young men fled Florence for a villa outside the city walls. Telling stories killing time.
*
The doors I see in front of me are immense. Opening, they release a procession of mourners from the cathedral. The coffin disappears like a bullet into the chamber of a waiting car. The cortege slips away into the city. I wonder whether the departed was a distant relative I never knew. You arrive stranger than the afternoon, calling my name and saying, “Look, a funeral!” Your grand entrance with corpse and mirror. In flight from the recent catastrophe.
*
The dead are not dead. They gorge on the fake fruit and plastic flowers we left out for them. The dead are not dead. Each night, they steal stones from the city’s walls and streets and place them inside their mouths. Look all around. The walls fall. The roads quake. If the dead could speak, they might call us by our true names.
