I can see this poem is intent on being Catholic
though it started out agnostic

Who’s there?
Who is it that can inform me?
How is it that the clouds still hang on you?

Poetry is to jazz
as literature is to music
as Lake Como is to the Arno River

Sir Winston Churchill advised against suicide
“Especially when you may live to regret it.”
After an endless faculty meeting at Princeton,

Unable to distinguish between flying and falling
With a feeling of splendid contempt and with a strange loving longing 
In my eyes, I look up at the helicopter that was lately  my home 

When I think of all the Annes
in my life they’re all you almost

The stars have gone north, abandoning the city
For this wilderness that is mine, if only for a time,
Long enough to learn the language of the leaves before

In my younger and more existential days, the most innocuous of phrases—the ubiquitous “how are you,” for example—would cause rockets of nausea to crash in my belly. There was a time, to be sure, when I could answer “fine” with the best of them. Daily vomiting rapidly cured me of that. 

The film begins in Venice
As conceived by the dreamer before
He begins his journey, which ends

She went to his head like a double martini at a bar
Where gangsters gather after a hit. She wanted his baby.
They sat at a corner table, quarreling about money,