Sidewalk Poem #12

Near Arcidosso, Tuscany. July 1979.

Maybe I like this city for being

nearly unknown, off in the mountains.

Over and over the cuckoo calls from the chestnuts

this sleepy midday. Red and lemon posters 

for a circus, ORFEI, plaster every wall,

and I can imagine a humdrum Orpheus

ambling the narrow street to the bakery,

pausing to stare

at the rount fountain where a stone mask

blows a thin rope of water

into a basin, a rope without ends.

He would climb to the old castle,

baking in sunshine, where

the air is alive with bees

that build in the crumbling masonry.

What would he make of it all? Would he stand,

his eyes blurring with tears

looking back through the smoke of time

at the men and women, come and gone,

who have seen how the earth is lovely

and seen how its meanings desert them?

-David Young, from Foraging.

[Old homes in Arcidosso, Tuscany.]