Roberto Forieri, TI AMO (final?)

Roberto Forieri, TI AMO

Roberto Forieri, TI AMO is written over
a grey patch of paint, washed over

the ochre stone of a Spoleto apartment,
as if to rub away what’s underneath.

Here some lover of Roberto Forieri
has dated him 09-10-2009,

a new born scrawled into an ancient city.

Around the corner above the iron-gated archway
of a small brick church; the fresco

--a term meaning freshly and quickly
painted— rubs the sleep from its eyes.

Nightly is the nun there, coming quickly.
She climbs her ladder up to face it, sponge in hand.

She returns each night to scrub the faces;

her hands circling slowly across the stone forever.
Until one day the Virgin Mary appears without a nostril,

then only one eye, then none at all.

She recedes into the instinct of a thin black line,
the four men who stand on either side; their faces too

rubbed thoroughly.

The one who stands nearest her, holding his brow still, a vague trace
of earlobe in his old age. He turns to abstraction for meaning,

while the smallest remains on the wall, freshly painted—
a child whose household, a painted stone,

is disappearing or elsewhere returning.

It leaves you here. It leaves you,
a fixed stare,

a blue iris.