Lying down
at the day’s intermission,
I listen to Puccini arias,
and am transported to Lucca,
his walled hometown,
with its *****-white streets,
its darkened straits,
its massive cathedral under
eternal construction.

Life limps along in
effervescent flux here,
beauty kept dormant,
or sprouting like a tree
from the Torre Guinigi’s
grassy roof.

A one-time amphitheater
sports cloned tourist shops.
Only one
sells Puccini souvenirs.
La Boheme survives
on note cards and
lop-sided bookmarks.

The composer’s legacy turned
into trinkets made in China.
A vast, discounted reserve
of memory, kitsch and fame.
Still, they provide me
a precarious solace.

Music without words
charts my tourist mood
of endless angst.
Opera is the grandest art,
some critics claim.
The human condition rendered
thick in symbol and sound.

Happily, I carry
the philosopher’s stone
to decipher the soaring
scores.
They say, passion, foreboding,
no regrets. A fluttering
high C stirs the airwaves.

Ululating sopranos,
searing tenors sigh
heavenward.
The last act over,
the curtain rises on
the dull, restless, repetitive
routines of everyday life.

In the background,
echoes of Tosca, currents
of ruin and rust.
We must embrace our destiny
even on the off-notes.
Opera’s solo signal:
Amor Fati.

Six waterfalls shoot through the viscera of the mountain,
jack-hammering the stone with the precision of
an Excalibur ax. The jet-engine force of the water
cannot be resisted: It is destined for victory,
deep canyons the sign of its easy conquest

We all carry a waterfall within us --
spidery and delicate, or pummeling the heart like
a heavyweight prize fighter. The count nears 10.
The falls are guaranteed a TKO. The heart, a soggy
mess of muscle, simpers in its corner, lost and forlorn.

I shower beneath my falls, which wear away
all my grit and grime, all my stains and soot, for the mere
price of my surface blood. “Vengeance is mine,”
declares the falls, laughing as I stagger beneath the weight
of the water, scrubbed clean again, but missing the heart.

Circles of rope, white, grey and bilious, squeeze around
Wetterhorn Mountain’s chest, leaving only its angled
forehead in sight. Like the tail of St. George’s fiery dragon,
the clouds sink into stone, ******* down their grip
until nothing is left breathing, until nothing is left. Stone
emits a feeble cry of fear and trembling. The dragon’s
tail squeezes tighter, intent on suffocation -- severe oxygen
deprivation above timberline.  
                                                          
Rain is the Sancho Panza to the mountain’s Quixote;
the circles of Dante’s Hell mirror the clouds’
constant clinging below the pointed, harpoon peak.
You can climb this mountain as in Purgatory, but its path
is polished to a slippery ***** from the clouds’
constant rains: such a dubious, deadly affair. Only St. Georges
persevere here; only the holy ones manage not to stumble
on the bulky, slick rocks.
                                        
Rain is not a baptism, but an ablution.
Rain threatens the clarity of the day. Rain threatens
the clinging of the day to the present. Always, such rain will pass.
Puddles in post holes, precarious ascent to the cloudless light.
Rain clears the path in hindsight but nurtures the future to come
quickly, like cacti with brief, brilliant blossoms.
Let the thorns be your payment for grasping the blooms.

The old man clamped onto my hand
like a manacle of stars.
I gazed up at his wispy, white beard
and watched his cheeks tremble
as he recited the Iliad in the
original Greek.

Simone Weil, a French philosopher
who starved herself to death,
condemned the violence of the poem
as a testament to the brutality
oozing out of men's souls. Little
to celebrate there. Plenty to mourn.

Hexametric rhythms caught my
hearing: They echoed in my brain
like exhales from labored breathing.
Life or death lost its meaning.
The will to power conquers all.

Swift movements of being, and
broadswords plunged through
finely hammered breastplates.
Black blood pooled at the victim's
feet. Another triumph for Agamemnon.

The old man, collapsed at the poem's
end, shape-shifted to a marble bust of Homer.
I turned to grasp his missing hand,
But the constellation of stars had vanished.
He had instantly become blind.

Like flowers on a hillside, mountains turn their faces each day
to follow the sun. The radiance from their foreheads proves
irresistible. It is Agamemnon’s golden death mask. By afternoon,
the gray countenance beneath the finely hammered gold
turns green. The peaks are envious of the blumen that beam
the same brilliance throughout the day

Mountains vainly yearn to reproduce themselves.
Avalanches create one pseudo-answer. But they
are messy, ugly, out of control, leaving body after
body in their wake. They destroy life, not create it.
Some mountains have had their DNA tested --
double helix of stone incapable of even rudimentary
cell division. Solitude, loneliness attack
their dreams. They sternly stand guard over the very
flowers they envy. They are virtually immovable, all-powerful.

Weather wraps itself around their mute witness, stirring
up storms. Titanic overseers, they claim a streak of divinity in their
gray strata. No one dares question their beliefs. But I do,
whenever Gatsby’s green light turns pink. The shame they show
reflects hubris, overreaching their place in creation. What
they envy is not color, motion or beauty. They lust for life.

Pink turns to fiery orange. Not only is their DNA lacking,
but so is the color of sustenance: blue. By nightfall, blue turns to
black indigo. Mountains crane their heads together, bow to
the missing sun and dream about biology. But they know from
whispers of those who have climbed them that they are out
of their element. The wind gusts; they sigh. Below, deer graze
in quiet, green pastures. It restoreth their souls.

Sunshine guides my vision

away from the shadow play
of giant cottonwoods and maples,
as a north breeze gently unsettles
them. Clumps of swaying branches.

Shadows, like portrait paintings,
fall onto the pavement. Such marvel.
I must write about it -- an ode
to darkness, yin to the sun’s yang.

But soon I see the face of Pablo Neruda.
Wise, whimsical, a piercing gaze.
Of the ode, he is all-knowing. I follow
the sunshine back -- today, empty-handed.

Blind to the beauty of the world,
he tenderly takes her hand
and brushes a kiss across it,
then blushes at his boldness.

Whatever she cherishes, he pounces
on to rationalize away into the ether.
It is Mars vs. Venus of the spirit.
But when blindness drives him
further inward, Venus invariably wins:

Her love cannot abide the boor,
the bore, the shamefully bold.