"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