Ufficiali di Notte

Florence, 1432

As twilight hums and men are released
from professions, the Office of the Night knocks,
checking at houses with sons, probing

popular neighborhoods near the unfinished dome
for nocturnal codes and conjugated
accusations. The great oculus squints

at writhing corners of shadows, the edges
of palaces and sheds where the city is undone
by its civics. Your family has dismissed you

from evening meals, and in this particular lane
a cloud of others’ suppers wafts from houses
where your presence would invite visits,

fines, beatings, worse. According to neighbors,
who have been asked, you couldn’t care less
about sex, never a woman swelling in

your parents’ house. Unseeing of your acts,
they sleep through your consoled entrance at
some late hour, edges rubbed ragged with imprints

of architecture, the rough fit of your front
into the urgent curve of that arch where you let
him pin you. Your ribs undone by the press of

the sandstone, you’ve just glimpsed the math
radiating from the perfect circle, these structural
thrusts. In every alleyway, men slur

the hymn of the half-done dome, a deadened
overture to the herringbone brickwork that hollows
above the streets. Another’s hands on your waist,

your shirt pocket tears from the weight of wages’
hard round mouths, national faces stamped
on their surfaces. These spill from the rip

down your marble-cold legs, lost in
the cobblestones, the only things you abandon
when those who have heard your small mouthings,

the tracery of your breath, come with their lanterns,
set you running through the streets, released
like an integer from flourishes of stone.