With a man, a city, an era
Of your life in which everything was filtered
Through wine and sunlight
And obfuscated with ivy? In which everything,
Rosied, perhaps, by retrospect,
Seemed like celluloid transposed
Onto your memory? Are you in love with who you were then? 
Did she seem brighter?
Did she smile wider through lens flares?
Is that the only way you can access her now?
She may as well have ceased with the dawn; 
Her skin aglow in the sun
and the flash of a camera -
Doesn't she look so alive, so lucid, 
It seems a shame for her to not peel from the film.

In April we moved to Italy.
And while my world opened up, it shrank
To the size of a sun-glint against an amber eye,
And a homely, blank labyrinth
Of walls with an undetermined future. 
He was there, after a lifetime of distance,
Just across the hall. Living. Breathing. 
He looked different in the Florentine springtime,
His face half shrouded with shadows
That sharpened his contours
In the least familiar way. We catch eyes across stretches of cotton,
Under umbrae cast from willows that splay above us.
It swounds cinematic, but I’d seen them a million times,
Across a million lives,
And each had elapsed into that one moment. 
I notice something new
In the way they crinkle at the sides,
But decide that they’re just wine-glazed and hazy.
Eclipsed by a mist of solipsism. 
There are a million little plotlines
Too tightly entwined to untie
And they’re helixed unintelligibly
Right here.