Pisa

There’s a seductive sadness at the heart of Europe
That calls me to myself,
Probing, persisting,
Homing in on It.
Wandering through Pisa’s deserted streets after dark,
Gazing down the Arno’s curve,
I fear that I feel nothing,
Nothing at all.

October’s coming on,
The hunt begins,
And wild mushrooms thrust up from the dark.
The viper and the boar
Contest my soul.

Roman sarcophagi in the Camposanto,
Bathtubs of the dead;
(Soil of Golgotha
That will rot a corpse in twenty-four hours)
…Browsing the arcades,I wonder
At man’s need to turn every experience
Into art, and render mortality
Architectural. There is no evanescence
That cannot be made solid.

“Flawed from the start,”
Says the guidebook,
“The Leaning Tower
Would surely have toppled,
Had the Pisans not been at war
For a hundred years,
Giving the soil time to settle”.