Our bus maintains a distance-runner’s pace.
Lurching on tires scraped bare as marrowbones,
It whisks us past a teeming marketplace.
We shun life. What we’re after is old stones.
Pillars the Greeks erected with a crane
Went up in sections as canned fruit is stacked.
An accurate spear could pierce a soldier’s brain
Before he’d even known he’d been attacked.
Bright fresco of a wild symposium
With busy whores, nude boys, a choice of wines –
(“And where in Massachusetts are you from?”)
Abruptly, snowdrifts clasp the Apennines.
“Wouldn’t you think him practically alive?”
Says someone of a youth fresh out of school
Painted upon a tomb, who makes a dive
Into the next world’s waiting swimming-pool.
Lunch is a belch-fest: rigatoni, beer.
A saw-toothed wind cuts paths through flat-topped pines.
Weathered white temple columns linger here
Like gods who went away and left their spines.
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