I sit in the Galleria dell’Academia in Florence.

At the end of the hall stands David,

looking like a quarterback about to rifle one downfield.

Around me stand the four “Prisoners,”

unfinished blocks of marble

where the figures struggle to get out of the stone

the way Michelangelo said they should

while he was off writing a poem.

My favorite is the guy with the raised elbow,

struggling like hell to break the stone’s silence.

A man sits next to me wearing a stylish raincoat, fedora,

soft leather shoes, and says, “I can teach you Italian in two days.”

I say, “What?” He says, “Take your hands out of your pockets.

I’m not talking your around-the-corner-pizza-shop Italian

with slow syntax and crude gestures, not that Kevin Kline

I’m-in-the-movies stuff. I mean the real thing,

the Italian of Boccaccio, Machiavelli, Petrarch, and Dante,

the Tuscan dialect, restrained yet expressive,

a constant commentary on whatever you say.”

“Two days?” I say. “How can you be so quick?”

“I practice,” he says. “Aspetto momentito. Look around you.

These are my students.”

“But they can’t speak.”

“Not yet.

Okay, my little joke, but by trying to teach them, I get good.

Look at that one you like so much. See how he suffers.

Already he knows Hebrew. And the one with the stiff hands

at his side could do English very well. You can do Italian.”

They call them con men because we give them our confidence.

The light in his eyes blazed into my imagination,

and I was navigating a Lancia sedan in downtown Roma,

cigaret in one hand gesturing to a lovely lady next to me,

the left hand talking to traffic so much more gracefully,

yet as emphatic as any Boston trucker. I could do this.

“Tomorrow? Domani?”

“Bring lira,” he says. And I dream.

The Wolf Moon

By Michael Brown

For five nights the wolf moon

rose like a Chinese lantern,

its mottled orange paper face

driving small nervous creatures wild.

Deer stepped through snow fields,

jumped fences and worked the margin

of salted roadside grass,

a double lure close to death.

Later the moon jumped and rolled,

shone on hungry rodents, silent wings,

deer’s ears dancing between want and won’t,

furry things seized from above.

They chose the easy dangerous place,

watched the young die violently,

and even if they feared it,

they couldn’t help themselves.