8. Gulf

How much?
10,000 barrels,
a millionth of an ounce in a bathtub,
an oceanliner ever four days.
We don’t know.
A four inch hole in the sea floor
someone tipping and losing a drink.
It isn’t the first time.
What do you do with all that oi?
Some say disperse,
some say,
“nothing.”
The earth knows better than we do
the sea will heal its own.

7. Seminario

“Welcome pilgrim and tourist”
- found on a sign in Seminario Vescovile S. Andrea

It could have been a field hospital
in the second World War,
hastily converted to serve as
a waystation for the wounded.
These wide tiled halls flanked
by rooms to the left and right
lined with beds. Even the location
is right: Italian hills that
might have hidden Allies and
Musselini’s forces equally well.
Later it might have been a
sanitorium or psychiatric
facility, that institutional feel
permeating.
But in this seminary priests
have wandered for centuries
undisturbed. Light pours through
the windows at either end
of the hall, 5 meters high,
a few chairs scatted before each.
A fresco adorns the top of
every doorway, here the Virgin,
here St. Ignatius.
Dust collected on most ledges
but the hallway has few.
One priest, the only soul we
see in two days
in this 100-meter-long wing
moves steadily and slowly down
the hall. He is of a
dying breed. We are the only
travelers staying here,
though there are beds for a hundred.
On the way up the steps
a picture of John Paul II hangs above a
plaquered sign: “Welcome
Pilgrim and Tourist”

6. Volterra

I went to an ochre city
in a month of wandering.
I walked: up the cobbled
hill, down alley, down steps.
I sat: in a baptistry
in its eight hundredth year,
round and alabaster white
on its unadorned facade.
In the basin men were dipped
and receive the germ of the
holy spirit. Now the tile
cistern is empty; above it
Christ still raises a hand
and holds his thin cross.
Below him where once was water
are pilgrims’ coins.

When I quit the church I sat
on the city’s steps and
peeled an orange:
the hold spirit. Below
the Tuscan farmland
bore its fruit, and
some ten miles off windmills turned
on their precipice of hope.