My feet are bleeding because I wear heels wherever I go and because also I walk wherever I go. You can’t tell, because my shoes are red and my toes are painted red.

The blue sky is pressed between the walls, and the walls shine. The shutters are open. “Madonn’,” invite the men, leaning toward me. That dense and best name. “Oh Maria.”

I have a lover who sweetly asked me at lunch some days before I left, did I hope to find a holiday lover? “You can be honest with me. Do you fantasize?” I am and have always been a plug gone half in the socket, snapping white.

There is a John by Giuliano Vangi striding beside the Arno, opposite the Arno’s flow, pointing and speaking. Addled, restless, and open-mouthed.

I walk at a good clip in every country and I hurry in the Tuscan hills and I hurry in the city. My Los Angeles lover goes like sparkling rain over the landscape and crosses orange buildings like light and shadow. Men say “Bella, bella donna, bella donna.”

– all over the country which seems, unlike any other place I have been to, populated by woken people. They seem to be people like me and therefore I say woken. Maybe it is untrue or unfair but to my particular soundlength I say and it seems to me that the whole of America is shut and not listening and making no sound.

Here is the brown Arno and John putting his foot down – “Madonn’,” sighs the policeman with his big gun.

I am at San Marco understanding beauty and I wonder what it is I ought to do and asking at the fresco of the two thieves to do what I wish to do, well and virtuously – for all this time I have gone as I would, and not glad, sullen and pushy and hurt.

Brown clean halls and Brother Angel’s lines, and –

across the whole wakefulness of time and history, all the cactus’ open rose flowers, the standing eels, the black cobras’ hoods, split papayas and their black seeds, feet stretching their toes, the filled cup and the water in the well and the sea at the top of the sea, which is white like the light at the socket –