Again I Walk
the Ancient Via Aurelia
Ron smith
past its mostly lovely trattorie, carafes
of generally acceptable vino della casa
gleaming beside modest plates of pasta,
glimpse, just down Via San Gallicano,
the long façade of Raguzzi’s Ospedale
di San Gallicano, with a sooty church stuck
in its center like that black grease between
our neighbor’s blue eyes on Ash Wednesday.
Everything seems smaller than it should,
than it did.
Via della Lungaretto is narrow
as a cleaver cut, laid down on top of the
Romans’ rectissima Via Aurelia. We cross
the piazza where more often than not
Sant’ Agata of the Chopped Off Breasts and
San Crisogono, toga’d in a clam shell, are
facing off again. Since I know only that he was
“martyred,” her agony again wins my private
pain tournament. Today, he seems carefully
looking away from the angry gaze of the bloodied
Agata. And so to Giocchino Belli, of the truly nasty
sonnets, in his hypocritical top hat and stone tails,
uniform of the Vatican Censor. Why have I come
to adore this guy’s disguises and stealth? Past
one of my favorite (bad) ristoranti to Palazzetto
dell’Anguillara, with the only standing tower
that kept this district safeish from the 1200s
to today. (Crossbow snipers in the belfry?) Casa
di Dante, ever since the Great War began its
masochistic spasms, hosts Divine Comedy
declamations, shelters the best DA collection
in Italy. Shall we elbow into Bar Belli for a quick
Negroni? We shall. Then one more. Wobbling out
past a cobbler, baker, English bookshop, belching
orange bitterness, then Casa dei Mattei stuccoed all
over with bits of ancient Rome, plaques and fingers,
shoulders and what look like knees, a toy bell tower,
smallest in the city. Piccolo, Delores burps.
Tiny St. Benedict lived here,
I decide to believe.
Delores wants to steer me right,
but I want to bear left and cross Ponte Cestio to
Tiber Island so that we can pretend to be sailing
on that stolid ship. And so I stand on its prow, look
to the invisible sea, Delores punching at her cell,
her back to the exhilarating wind and suddenly I
realize what I’m looking for. I fish an airline bottle
from an inner pocket and sip a burning Kentucky
toast to diminutive George, hard drinking, long
dead, and finally I consciously grieve just a little—
grieve that I never did, that I never can—just stroll
with my mentor—with our friend—through the
bountiful jumble of my favorite city. The kids
are fine, Delores says. We look at each other.
George, I say. I know, she says. He would have
loved being with us, her eyes say. I hand her
what’s left in the tiny bottle.
Ron Smith
Ron Smith’s book That Beauty in the Trees was published in 2023 by LSU Press. His The Humility of the Brutes, Its Ghostly Workshop, and Moon Road were also published by LSU. Smith’s poems have appeared in many periodicals, including The Nation, Kenyon Review, Georgia Review, Five Points, and Arts of War & Peace (Université Paris Diderot). He is currently Consultant in Poetry and Prose at St. Christopher’s School in Richmond, Virginia, and Poetry Editor for Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature. In recent years he has partnered with the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts to present poems associated with Man Ray’s Paris years and its “The Horse in Ancient Greek Art” exhibit. His poems have been translated into Japanese, Italian, French, and Spanish. Smith’s newest poems can be found in Plume, Blackbird, Cold Mountain Review, and Style. From 2014 to 2016 Smith was the Poet Laureate of Virginia.