Sicily is the golden caesura of history,
Where the human poem is paused to hear
The exalted precipice of its own sigh.

The dead lie like Rome,
Like toppled sunshine in stone,
From a boy who had blown
Into the seashell of the Forum,
Heard back in restoning, the alley of home,
The narrow, basket-flowered angiportum…
But, lips too strong, let out unknown
The stone-witherings of Medusa
And the bone dust of empire.

Venezia, its musical key of brick and shade
And the canals in rejoining polyphony
Sweeten the dour Church-ear.  
From the impasto knife and loose brushwork,
A thumb-smear of waves and gently-bristled strife
Rise to assumption of the cloud-submerged bay,
Mural of cristallo, only-light without landscape,
Made too from the winds of Murano,
Its clayed blowpipe of waterways molding
The lagoon of blown glass and bouquet of colored sea-shadows.

The Tiber lies on its side, like the lion and fox,
Licking its paws at empire’s dust,
A drifting gaze of water that already foresees
The swift-run northward to Romagna,
Where the veined fur of the roe will succumb…
A ripple twitches like one dark claw of the Borgia…

The watercolors of the Arno are a fresco
On the wet plaster of the lips of Firenze, Tuscan fire-dream.
Or like the warring leg in curve of counterpoise,
Sprung foot-forward to the daring world
And arm slung down in stone-victory
From this valley, too much like Elah,
With taunting eyes turned from the Medici toward Rome.

The earth-dark octaves of her singing hair,
Sung-circles of campagna, the citadel,
And campanile bells in the Segestano air.
The pail sits like an expectant kiss on the lip of the well.

Oh you,
delightful man -
you find beauty
in everything.

I hope, one day,
you'll be able
to see
beauty
also in me.

The light from the end of eternity
Comes in through the window glass
Sits on the sill with the red Anthurium
In the stenciled orange Waterford vase
Centuries.down.and.Decades.done.
From the grassy light of the Lyceum.

If the sun were to choose where to die,
It would falter over Pompeii,
And lie like a broken godhead
Or lava poured into the pottery cups of
The open-skied houses.

when the Tuscan sunlight trickled through the blinds,
pouring gold specks into the room
and your light hums reverberated into my ear
as we laid in tangled sheets
it dawned on me that
home was never a place —
home was a person.
this is it, i thought
this is home.