You were heir to some city-state, Verona, say, sent to Bologna, finishing school for minor city princes.
I was a diligent itinerant, a Dominican, eh? Pounding out my questios posing disputationes at U of P—what posh Parisians called it in those days.
Each sunset, letters raced across the Alps, one thousand kilometers— as the pigeon flies—dividing us.
But we all know what Bologna’s for— raising philosopher kings heavy on the statecraft whose knees aren’t worn
with the burns of genuflections, smooth foreheads uncreased by worried lines of should and shouldn’ts. we are a class of boyish insurrections: Via Zamboni’s paved with blood of petty politico-academic rivalries.
I was deep in bed with my scientific queen, and wouldn’t leave, not even when the fearful hollow of mine ear was pierced by your silver lark: you sang so cunningly to wake.
Come back to bed! I cried— there’s room for three! but larks cry havoc, and release the dogs of war.
You wouldn’t stay. or look at her, she who I worship in the day and slave for every night.
I've always yearned for a man whose thirst, like the hart's is never slaked— by wine, whiskey, or divinity.
But in Bologna, tutors beat out appetite, until your thirst has turned ravenous greed. For flesh, for followers, and for infamy.
Your stomach's never empty, and your mouth is never dry. What is prayer to such as you?
I asked. I waited. What's prayer? Was your reply.
I know petition and appeal, I know justice, merit, and right punishment meted out in temperent jurisprudence.
What you call study is a longing for what you do not have. School teaches us to want for nothing, nothing infinite, nothing inadmissable, inaccessible, ungraspable.
School teaches us to grasp, to wrest, to carve, to chisel at these city-states until our portrait is the map.
I held you, like Christ's hazelnut, for an eon and a half, cradled in my hand and heart.
Goodbye, I said, adieu. I took the next camel-train across the Alps. Back home to Paris, without you.