Saturday, January 10, 2015

"Now that I have seen Boniface"



Now that I have seen Boniface
In his niche at Orvieto
Along the solitary thread of Italy’s
Appennino, of Pasolini’s imagined
Homeland and its search for the meaning
Of material history, of Dante’s “serva
Italia,” anyone’s date for a buck…

Now that Edward Snowden’s
Contribution to free speech
Has been eclipsed by dirty
Cartoons (of the prophet’s anus)

And Nietzsche has eaten
His own feces in the absence
Of a living God, and the best of us
—in this first world bubble in which I travel—
are only marking time

‘til things get better, putting
our faith in struggles so personal
they are all but invisible
on the outside—even in Orvieto
on its tufa-stone island
high above the floodplain of the Paglia

like a rudderless rock lost
in a sea of millennia, all
its secrets sunk in caves
hidden beneath the day-
to-day business of business…

now that I know nothing
shows on the outside, nothing
is real—between the intention
and the act—I’m more or less happy
to lay down my belief
in the concept of “a future.”



                        1/8/2015
                        Orvieto