Current Issue: Spring/Summer 2011

The Rest of Us Don’t Have to Try That Hard 
David Kirby

Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be
violent and original in your work.

            If you were in St. Peter’s in Rome and you heard
someone say, as I did, “This is a magnificent facility,”
            would you think, if St. Peter’s is a “facility,” does that
mean the Church could make money on the side
            by renting it out for conventions, boat shows, auto-da-fés?
When it wasn’t being used for weddings and funerals,
            of course. Oh, and masses. Anyway, the guy who says

            this to me is my colleague here at our school’s program
in Florence, and I’m supposed to meet him today
            to go look at a fresco, but when he doesn’t show,
the program director tells me he’d been out drinking
            with the students the night before and running his hands
over the young women and overserving himself
            and falling off a bar stool and knocking his brains out

            and going to the Santa Maria Nuova hospital to get them
stuffed back in again and is now convalescent and,
            the director hopes, thoroughly ashamed, and then she says,
“Why, what were you and he supposed to do?” and I say,
            “Well, I was supposed to take him to look at
a fresco and then see if he wanted to go to lunch, but I’m not sure
            that’d be exciting enough,” though all the while

            I’m thinking the rest of us don’t have to to try that hard.
Meet the class, take roll, pass out the quiz, collect
            the quiz, discuss the assignment, make an assignment
for next time: that’s pretty much it. Drink, but not too much.
            Don’t fall down. Get sexy, but only with the person who
wants you to get sexy with him or her, and never
            in public. Don’t look at the admittedly underdressed

            students and act like a kid in a candy store. In a real candy
store, the candy wants to be nibbled. Also, the gumdrops
            don’t talk to the jawbreakers any more than the sour balls
to the licorice whips, whereas these kids tell each other
            everything: a day later, I learn that, when my colleague’s
daughter came to Florence a week earlier, she descended
            on our princelings, chose a fellow years

            younger than herself, and had sex with him,
whereupon he, exercising the modesty and self-restraint
            of his breed, ran around yelling that he had just bagged
the professor’s daughter. Did I say these kids tell each
            other everything? They tell us, too, not to mention
the Italians, and as a result, the rest of us don’t have to try
            that hard. I see so many Italian men in their forties and fifties,

            still arrogant in their good looks yet aware that those looks
are going, that soon they’ll be, not ugly, but just average,
            just old. They’re still looking at the girls, but the girls
aren’t looking at them. My colleague is 61 years old
            and though he still sees himself as a kid, to the students
he’s staggering down the streets like a geezer in a nightcap,
            cackling and chasing the maidens who giggle as they bat

            away his hands, though two days after the bar stool incident
and one after the trashy daughter’s visit, I see our hero heading
            down to the pub where he got into trouble
in the first place and learn the next morning that, as the students
            tell me, he “straddled” one of our young women as she sat
sipping her drink, and I think, Straddled? What was he
            going to do, give her a lap dance? The rest of us don’t have

            to try that hard, except to set forth what we see before us,
just as the father of all chronicles wrote, “I, Herodotus
            of Helicarnassus, set forth my history, that time may
not draw the color from what Man has brought into being,”
            and I, too, will paint as best I can the picture of our days,
their lemony dawns, the white heat of their noons,
            the creep of wine-dark shadows from one hill

            to the next, the jet of their midnights, and everywhere
in this beautiful city the crashed-out bicycles,
            the sconces on the stone walls, the padlocks
on the Ponte Alle Grazie, the tools of the shoemakers,
            woodcarvers—all trades, their gear and tackle
and trim, as the poet says, all things counter,
            original, spare, and strange. Especially strange.