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.

4. & 5. Body and Blood

I. Body

For shelter
we stepped into St. Maria’s
and sat on the hard wooden pews.
I’m long overdue for confession,
she said,
but the prists only speak Italian.
Outside the rain flew from sky to slate.
I looked at my hands, brought them together,
then let them fall to my sides.

Christ in glass held tears from us
on the far side of the wall
one heavenly body shielding us
from another.

II. Blood

Walk, pilgrim, on the streets
worn down by your forebearers;
Rome is a city of ashes.
In the transfiguring light of
afternoon any outreaching
carapace might be a crucifix
illuminated; any cafe owner
Gabriel himself.
Stumble on the stones of yearning
catch yourself on the earth,
ashes again.
Drink of Christ,
the grapes and ground,
and on the table witness
the bottled oil separate
into the light of indivisibility:
what is bread,
what is body,
what is blood.

3. Afternoon in Dublin

Five friends spent the
scant hours between coming from
one place and going to the next
practicing transience:
they are young
one stands on the grass of an
ouroboros and the others wonder
if she should do that, they
weren’t allowed to walk on the
green of Trinity College,
only admire. What
is the weight of a city?
It’s grit or history?
The bus driver’s jokes?
This castle was built eight hundred years
ago to keep out the Vikings.
That spire was erected five years
ago to show what men can do.
The friends wander trying to find a
bar, someplace atmospheric.
The rain threatens but holds.
Soon it will not be this way,
they will step from the edge of
time, build houses, grow old.
They walk back toward the bus station
to leave and cross the river,
humming silent and heavy
as a churchyard beneath.

2. Forgetting

In summer I picked my way
through a coarse country
searching for a way
to turn poetry into memories,
but every field I entered
was an anthem for disregard
cattails shaking in the wind
as if we could all garner some joy
from those filaments.
Every man is a field of stones
and every stone a diamond.
I was promised the lgiht of
carbon sprung from within
but every movement of the
ground shot the sky full of blood.
I stepped through the fields of June
with my hands empty
and breastbone open
wringing memories from stones
green with the symbiosis of loss,
each stone in its cast-off place.

1. Heatwave

I wrote you a poem.
I wrote you a thosand poems
sat you down on the sofa and
tried to get our minds off the heat
with new shoots I raised in the spring.
You didn’t listen, you were too busy
becoming your father
sweating there on the cuordoroy couch
like a block of parmesan in the sun.
Have I told you what a good-looking piece
of hard cheese you make?
That I admire the shade of yellow your skin wants
when it’s hot and you’ve been smoking too many cigarettes
and complaining about your father?
The one who left you in the park
that day when you were seven,
and forgotten, it seems,
until he returned with a newspaper and a
bouquet of tulips for your mother
forty-five minutes later?
You’ve never forgiven him.
But listen: I wrote you this poem to tell you
how much I like your sprung calves
and the way you drink coffee in gulps,
and also your hair,
which becomes a deeper shade of black
when you’ve been drinking coffee
and smoking cigarettes and sticking to the sofa
because it’s hot and your thighs have turned to jello
and the thought of your father makes you sweat.
The flowers were dying, you could see that
even then, and you weren’t falling for it
even if they were the same stratospheric red
as the sky above the park that afternoon.
He was leaving anyway.
I wrote you this poem
to get you to pay attention to me,
to get our minds off the heat.
Your thighs feel like tar
on that forest green cuordoroy.
It’s OK, I say, don’t you see
that I love you?
But my cheeks are tulip red
your eyes are what we learn:
two little boxes of sky.