In Urbino
IIn cold Urbino love is spoke of
Still in the old tongue. Our changed lives bear witness.
We know what we could not have known
Before we climbed the steep streets to the palace
To stand at the same window where the Duchess
Stood gazing, on that last "fair morning
The color of roses."
To our very great sadness,
Since it is lost--
Urbino is lost to us
As we are to each other.
No city but this could repay the long drive uphill
In winter, the night arrival at the hour
When all the doors were locked, which later stood open.
I have to speak of it because of what happened there
And praise it all my life.
II
We stayed for a time in Venice. There
A silvery sense of water licking porches
Slipped about our ears with a touch as light as breath,
And the stone gave way to the Adriatic Sea
As it always has.
One evening, as we were walking late, watching
The sun dump gold into the Grand Canal,
Our hands tightened, as if we gripped big jewels
Against the dying light.
Did I startle you? I gave way with a sigh
The long withholding.
You said, "I have something for you,"
And pulled from your coat a broken figure
Made of red clay. "See how the body gleams
And gathers light."
The darkness rustled.
There was a scent of almonds.
Your fingers glanced my breast
Clumsily. I gasped. You
Caught me close
And held me, trembling.
Tentative at first, we came to trust
Even the most common gestures of our hands.
Though Venice's splendid spires and palaces
Could never be home for us,
I came upon morning
There: A tree. five oranges glowing
From the green of the glossy leaves lifting out of the vapor
Which rose off the white canals.
Now, as Venice blooms in my mind, all its fixed images
Pulse through an apricot haze,
And shafts of washed gold burn and slide together,
Ubiquitous around the swimming buildings.
Again I hear rich cries, like call notes of birds
Waking. I listen; the cries subside
And are taken back into the ancient silence
Where they cannot be cancelled, though we never go back to Venice.
III
We traveled the worn-out coastal plain too long
And were late finding the road that rose to Urbino
Through the bony Appenines. As night lowered,
Pooling soft knots of houses on the slopes
In lapis lazuli, we fell silent.
I was thinking of Castiglione and of Yeats
Who came this way,
The wind blowing their voices in the air
That crossed our maps.
At the summit,
Nothing but darkness overhead, and winter falling
Upon the town, as we drove inside the walls.
IV
How can we speak of love when all we have
Is the silence that broadens between us?
Involuntary syllables break from us,
And the silence closes around them again, forever.
Yet I don't think given love diminishes
When it changes this way.
It is red earth, ground for our lives,
Air, fire and water--what Urbino's courtiers
Believed everything issued from.
V
In Urbino the old words rose in our breath again
The same as in the four-night conversation
They rose and rang in Guidobaldo's palace
More than four hundred years ago.
We praised the world, its comeliness and order,
And man, its mirror,
The great wheel of stars and seasons, sun and moon,
The courtly ways of government, of virtue, and of learning.
But chiefly love.
Love was the stony street we climbed,
The high window we looked from, smiling
After the tireless talk, love was the hill
Of the city, love, the walls, the weather, the clearness
Of morning air, the mountain-wandering wind.
Love was all that we were, a thousand times over
Forgiven and trusted, love, the hail
That rakes the naked outcrop,
Love, the cry of a man who has chosen wrong
At last and forever and knows it.
VI
Castiglione said he bore from those years,
To him the happiest four, sorrow's crown
Because they were gone. "What cannot be rehearsed
Without tears, there is a wilderness of sorrow
In that death, whose grief passes all the others,
Though all are dead,
So far that excellence surpassed the rest."
VII
I carry one fact through all the years remaining:
Beside the mountain road downward to Florence
Four stone houses stand, as bare as truth,
Blurred by rainclouds, hyacinthine sky.
Buildings are monuments.
They mark the places words as pure as fire
Rang in before they sank into the ground
Which keeps them.
VIII
For a brief time we were changed to angels
And beheld "the sovereign happiness
Whose abiding place
Is now here among us
In the flower of beautiful bodies and beautiful souls."
Once and once only and never again.
Further than that, love cannot be disclosed.