Se Non è Vero, è Molto Ben Trovato

← v18n1, Spring 2019

We have thought it best to always be

In one’s hour, even though time is

Not as careless as we had imagined,

Heartless, yes, the gesture of your

Guess is as good as mine, or to guess

Someone’s weight, someone’s height,

Someone’s girth, someone’s depth, and

While Andrea del Verrocchio was not

Eight hands high, he had a true eye,

Kept his brushes wet, eighteen

Fists from the ground to the forehead,

Six palms to a cubit, three inches to

A handsbreadth, in the architect’s palm

Three brutti ma buoni, watching the meringue

Harden in the oven, when dynamite

Inadvertently blows up something wonderful,

Or even itself, the roads lined with beauty

Strips, the strip malls lined with ugliness,

Storms passing quickly over the lands,

The experiment that we are having

Failed, the brick we build with cracked,

The faux beauty of rot, the invention of

The beginning and the adventure of

The end, buying Vitruvius an espresso

In an Aventine caffè, that story’s too long,

Too high to see above, the time we had

Listening, the time we had with touch,

The time we had tasting, now and at a later hour.

art time history

Edward Mayes

Edward Mayes is the author of five books of poetry including Works and Days (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999), winner of the Associated Writing Programs Prize for Poetry, and First Language (University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), winner of the Juniper Prize. His work has appeared in American Poetry Review , The Best American Poetry , The Gettysburg Review , Harvard Review , The Kenyon Review , The Massachusetts Review , The New Yorker , The Southern Review , and Poetry , among others. He is also the coauthor, with his wife Frances Mayes, of three books about Tuscany: In Tuscany (Broadway Books, 2000), Bringing Tuscany Home (Broadway Books, 2004), and The Tuscan Sun Cookbook (Clarkson Potter, 2012). Mayes is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and both the Cecil Hemley Memorial Award and the Gordon Barber Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. He previously served as the director of the creative writing program at Santa Clara University. He lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina, and Cortona, Italy. Photo by Steven Rothfeld