A horse was hag-ridden. Its owners filled a bottle with its urine, stopped it with a cork, and buried it: the witch could not piss and died in agony. The air hummed with flies when the travelers approached the cattle—rich odors of dung and hay. They heard an ouzel’s ringing tew tew tew; the peasants cupped their ears. Farmers tilled their small fields to the limit. Women carded and combed, clouted and washed, and peeled rushes as in Lynn. One woman became a man when he jumped over an irrigation ditch and his cunt dropped inside out: gender is the extent we go to in order to be loved. His mittens were made of rags.

Pastures sloped down to a rich valley divided into square farms, fields of rye grass for winter forage, and silvery olive orchards where blue tits sang tsee-tsee-tsu-tsuhuhuhu. In Bolzano, women trading in silk and leather in the square discussed Margery and Willyam as they arrived. Later, Margery woke feeling her heart skip a beat, another, another, as though it fell down stairs and she—laughing in surprise—scrambled after it.

When the pilgrims arrived in Bolzano, they were amazed to find Margery there and decided the spiritual advantage of readmitting her to their party might extend to speed and safety on the highway.

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Margery had been traveling for two months and she itched with desire. Her scalp itched and her skin crawled. All movement in time and space led to orgasm. When she arrived in Venice with the pilgrims there was still plenty of rain and cold, but she grasped the city’s beauty in the form of Jesus: gold light exulting over the big squares and on the water, the muddy narrow alleys, the clink of a courtyard fountain, always the layering of cool air over hot air, the yammering cats.

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L. returns from the street with pastry for breakfast. From bed, I hear clanks, a faucet’s hiss, fat spitting. We eat in harsh tremulous silence, caffeine tension riding above the emptied-out clarity of sex in the morning.

I follow L. He knows how to climb through narrow shafts of the Plaza Hotel to the roof. We share an intense visual life—all Central Park below us. Our best days are spent with attention turned outwards. He runs his tongue across the wind on his lips. His features are tense with perfection; they create the sensation of beauty as focus. We stroll around Boston, New York, San Francisco, Charleston, Florence, Sienna, Compostela, and Lisbon. I look for glimpses of him in other men through the lens of my attraction, then glimpses of his spirit in everything the world designs.