Original Prompt 1, Week 2

I'm sorry, I'm really not following the instructions for the Original Prompt like I'm supposed to, but I find these I'm a little more interested in doing. I'll do better next time.

For this one, I wanted to dance around Anthony Hecht's A Hill, and improv it as if it was a formulaic process in order to see where I end up. So this is me trying to follow A Hill intimately. It was harder than it looks (even if it does follow Hecht so closely).

Love, as everyone already knows, only happens
in Italy, nothing at all like the Italian Affair or the whimsy
of the oppressable spirit. Perhaps not love at all.
In a bar with friends, more table than empty space,
in the cool grasp of late evening--a pummeled presence
of bodies, like rocks cast and abandoned in the livid rush
of men in bubble jackets and women whose dresses clasp
by the reluctant cooperation of a single bedazzled ring,
they all drink. The faded light and music
like the cathedrals around us swelter praise,
so that even the small shots of liquor taste
like mouthfuls of Heaven's soluble ferocity.
And then, where it happened, the dancing spun out
and the lights gust upwards, belly rings and alcohol stains
swiped away and all the bar collapsed, grounded
to particles of stone walls and splinters of wooden
flooring and in its place, sky--open and blue
and the flat consistency of well ground pavement
bouncing its tarred heat off apartment buildings
and empty lots--the quiet tension of afternoon
in summer, where, somewhere in shadow the brush
bursts with points and fat, bobbing heads of blackberries,
the sound of grass dives under foot as we climb
on the grassy section of hill to lay
the cardboard, a foundation beneath our bellies
and propel downward into the rush of grass and scene.

And that was all, the heat of adolescence
left abandoned forever, as time often does.

And then the twirl moved through as my clumsy feet
twisted around the shuffling legs of another dancer
and for the entire night I wrap myself in tendrils
of sweaty intimacy, which sprouted faint rings
as natural as fingerprints into my palms
and all that dancing so unlike me, but like that hillside,
I grasp for the glittering glass behind the bar
and let its cobbled streets and creaking chairs
weave wrinkles into me.