— After reading “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” by William Butler Yeats

On this day, as you read and nod beside me,
vigilant all these weeks and months
beside the colorless clinical quiet of an IV drip,
the usual confusion of chemo clouds my brain

         and then
                        memories of Rome, glimmering like
        September’s grapes, round and ripe and sweet,
        untether me from this circular monotony
        of nurses, needles, symptoms and sounds.

        Some day I’ll take you to Rome, you said, and did,
        leading us along vias and vicolos you roamed sixty years ago,
        where Collegio Americano del Nord on the Janiculum
        had rooms like cells, but always pasta and Frascati wine.

        I see you standing at the top of the Spanish Steps
        pointing to my first view of St. Peter’s dome,
        telling how three of you seminarians walked to Naples
        to meet the new men, then hitchhiked back to Rome.

        I hear the splash of water and voices announcing
        the Fontana de Trevi around a corner from
        the Gregorian University where Jesuits lectured
        in Latin about philosophy, theology, and Greek.

        I see San Clemente, your favorite basilica,
        eleventh century mosaics above the altar,
        fourth century frescoes down steep stone stairs,
        and a crypt with water from an ancient aqueduct
        lapping beneath the niches of a Mithraic temple.

        Dispatched to a convent to contemplate your decision,
        you learned from Blue Nuns in Florence how to play pinochle,
        left the seminary, and boarded a ship in February 1957,
        so we would find each other.

        I remember we found peace in a pilgrimage
        to Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, pondering  
        an early martyr, and two grandchildren —
        Cianan and Cecilia — gone home to God.

On this day, as Taxol and Avastin, carefully-calibrated
prayers to mute clear-cell cancer, come dropping slow,
in my deep heart’s core I find Rome, and you.


This poem first appeared in Poetry Porch.com (2020).
Used here with permission.