November tourist, muscling my way through
the mistral, guidebook in hand, I turned into
a wind-tunnel alley, looking for 22
rue du Roi René, which as I knew

no longer marked the cloister of St. Clare.
Fitting, I thought, they’d built a theater
in its place, pleasing us arty types who’d care
Petrarch recorded he first saw Laura there.

And recorded and recorded. So many rhymes
and plays on her name, lauded so many times
as the sun and sum of all being, here she seems
solid as the church bell that now chimes

thrillingly on cue, only a block
or two away. I’m standing before the plaque
on the theater’s stone façade; it says that back
in 1327, when he took

one look at her that Good Friday, he was gone.
What does it really mean to love someone?
Am I serious, asking this? I’m sixty-nine,
the age he died, I understand convention,

crave it in fact. This one’s courtly love,
the beautiful bow to beauty set above
all others, the de rigeur frustration of
desire, his pining even for her glove

which of course she denies, and despite the birth
of eleven children and a ghastly death
(at thirty-eight, of the plague), her perfect youth
surviving, the least mortal thing on earth.

She’d married, or some scholars say she had,
an ancestor of the Marquis de Sade,
or maybe hadn’t. Old archives are so bad
when it comes to women, sometimes you’re just glad

there’s a tale to tell, however apocryphal.
And Petrarch’s children’s mother—whom no legal
tie ever bound, whose name’s illegible
to time, of whom no fact is known at all?—

I see her bring him candles he will light
one on another, staying up late to write
what she couldn’t read but heard about, and might
well star the peerless Laura, who tonight
again he’ll fall for, here, and at first sight.

This poem was published in Commonweal’s hundredth-anniversary issue, November 2024.