In Rome
The caretaker of the Military Cemetery
across the Via Zabaglia
from the Accatolica, where Keats, Shelley,
Gramsci, etc. are buried,
can tell you interesting stories
if you buy him a few drinks
after his shift, or on a Sunday
when the heat is great and the traffic slightly subdued.
He says his charges have their moods.
Normally satisfied
with their well-watered lawn, the neat ranks of their graves,
the shade of the concrete hand with its broken sword,
they are uneasy when visited;
collectively upset by ancient wives,
unfamiliar sons and daughters, unknown grandkids.
It isn’t that they’re unfeeling, but their ideas
of comfort, presence, peace are not those
of the living. Their perceptions
are, we would say, blurred. The touring
schoolchildren who occasionally come
do not appear to them as bored for life,
slaves of themselves, but as polite,
lovely, attentive archetypes
who nonetheless hear nothing and feel
no ghostly caress. No more than a tree,
the caretaker says, do his friends
regard themselves as rooted and motionless;
and although these particular dead
are male, they see action,
rather as women do, as someone coming
to them. Perhaps the Gestapo officer
who shot so many of them, prisoners,
in the head. And perhaps he does come
from wherever he lies to the north,
reluctantly, in horror
of their illogical welcome, their forgetfulness
his torment. But they are haunted by the living,
as if by incipient earthquake; like the cats,
their familiars. He seems reluctant to say more,
the caretaker, and you ask him
if it’s only the military dead
who stir thus. And he says
he has heard similar reports
from the staff across the street, where poets lie.
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