Arma virumque cano

At a rodeo in Pine Ridge, South Dakota, in an August wind that smelled of cotton candy, I made it five jumps out of a splintered bucking chute on a grey gelding named Pistol before I hooked my right kidney on a fencepost then lay eight days in St. Andrews Hospital with a catheter dripping blood from my manhood while student nurses in powder blue bibs used my lime green room to smoke Old Gold straights.
It was too tall for the rodeo game. I sold my bareback rigging, chaps, and spurs, and my blue and white boots with the wild roses on the top to my cousin's hog farming husband, then became the first person on either side of my family to attempt college.
Three years later, I sailed out of New York in the bowels of the Italian Line's "Vulcania", headed for Naples as a scholar of the American Vergilian Society. The money my mother earned sorting papers for the Rural Electrification Association purchased tweed coats from the Harvard Coop, interlinear translations of Greek and Latin, and small chunks of blond Lebanese hashish.
The throb of the diesel engines made me homesick for my railroading father. My roommates were a pair of fifty-year-old Sicilians, dressed alike in gabardine janitorial uniforms, who spoke neither English nor Latin. They perched on the edges of their bunks, hands in their laps, waiting for the nine-day voyage to end. I was invisible to them. The Vulcania's merchant seamen lounged outside the engine room and blew rings of Turkish smoke at my boots as I clomped across the steel grating above them.
The tourist class bar was just above waterline, with two scummy portholes and a waxed teakwood dance floor where men with black eyebrows spread their arms, squatted, and whirled to Patti Page tunes. I drank brandy and pretended to read.
Two days east of New York, fate slapped me together with Ursula, a trilingual poet from the Black Forest who was headed toward a publisher in Barcelona with fresh translations of Creely and Olsen into German and French. She was a Leo, still running from the bombing of her home in 1944. She smiled too easily. Sparks ran up my leg when our knees touched. We discussed Ferlinghetti, Ginzburg, the question of German guilt. Six hours later we found privacy in a life boat and made quick clumsy love. Her breasts tasted of salty cheese.
The Vulcania stopped for a week in Barcelona. Ursula and I rented a white plaster bedroom from a woman who sold parrots and light bulbs from her living room. Our afternoons were layered with sweat and tortured lust, our evenings with bread crusts and harsh wine. On the morning of the seventh day Ursula announced that she had decided to find a German publisher, that she had been offered an automobile ride to Munich. Goodbye.
The customs officer in Naples tried to buy my Levis. The Vergilian Society's villa north of Pozzuoli was swank, larger than the Carnegie library in Alliance, Nebraska. My room had speckled marble floors, high arched doorways, and leaded glass windows overlooking an overgrown Roman-era amphitheater where schoolboys tended delicate young grape vines. The Society provided a cook and a gardener, Maria and Biaggio.
My assigned course of study was "To ascertain, from extent works in Greek and Latin, whether the temple on the acropolis at Cumae had been an octostyle or enneastyle structure," whether it originally had been supported by eight or nine columns per side. The hill containing the ruins was a half mile from the villa. On the morning of the second day of my new life, I walked up to the temple and counted the stumps of nine columns per side. I was supposed to sit in a hollow mansion for eight months, translating dusty text, when any of the kids kicking soccer balls in the cobbled roads below could answer the central question of the inquiry and have one finger left over.
At breakfast on the twenty-third of October an envelope addressed to me lay beside a plate of fresh mozzarella. Inside was a poem from Ursula in Munich.

Come, speak with your child.
Plunge your cowboy tongue into my navel
And
Touch its gentle mind.
Listen at my hipbones with your thumbs
Hear this sibyl of your design.

I withdrew eight hundred dollars American from the Vergilian Society's account and gave half to Biaggio, telling him to tend his vegetables with care, to inform anyone who asked for me that I had gone into the field to study, that I was expected to return by Christmas. While waiting for the northbound train, I watched a German couple eating live baby squid from a small pewter bowl in the depot restaurant.
In Munich, I found Ursula living above the bakery where she worked. Beneath a woolen blanket I chewed on her collarbones as bread smells seeped through the floor. I lay the night listening to the chirping of distant Bavarian ambulances, deciphering a future containing a poetess and a child. On the next morning there was a large bloody print on the stiff grey percale sheet. Ursula had begun to menstruate.