Three boys, old enough to hurt someone,
young enough to think it doesn't matter,
sat outside the small green plot I came to.
Dante's grave. All of us pulled there,
experiencing gravity, out of control
for different reasons. I could not prepare,
really, for facing this, just as these boys --
smoking too deliberately, collars relieved
like rose petals from the extravagant
ceilings of basilicas -- could not understand
their own indifference, or why they huddled,
stared when I walked by. They were a type
of beauty, as far as beauty is ignorant of itself,
disdainful of place: that casual square,
Franciscan facade, that entire city turning
under the swelter of an afternoon, June
in the marshlands to the east. Sometimes,
I stand in front of history and feel nothing.
Then, some wrecked mosaic, awkward
in the transom of a secondary church, behaves
just so, as if the artists thought of me and all
my imperfections. Sometimes, people gather
in the hearts of forgotten cities, and I hate them
for their nonchalance（冷漠）, the terror in their boredom.
They have been dying here for millennia, these boys,
and there is little I can do, on this casual trip
in the heat, map in hand, to guide them out.
