"Thinking" at Civitella Ranieri in Umbria (Summer 2006)

Two poems at Civitella Ranieri, July 2006

Thinking

                        You see a man / trying to think. -- Adrienne Rich

Here an orange and black-spotted butterfly
tests the lavender. There a bee sips
the yellow and deep red interior
of a red zinnia in full bloom.
The man needs to be alone.

The butterfly shies away.

You see a man trying to think,
but first he must clear his head
and throat.

The man coughs.
The butterfly leaps from a lush pink to
a bright orange zinnia. The man is thinking.
Give him room. Figs grow plump and green
on the trees while he does his thinking.
The pomegranates in the bushes
are pregnant with seeds.
The orange butterfly has white spots
on a black border.
It is not the same butterfly as before.

Thunder in Umbria

How odd. Blue skies, white clouds, hardly any gray,
the sun a flaming disc, and warm,
and yet big drops of rain are coming down.
cooling my head for the sun to dry it out,
and now two hours have gone by, it’s still sunny
and yet there’s thunder in bursts and rumbles
as evening’s breeze blows the clothes
I hung out to dry on the line: burgundy t-shirt,
navy t-shirt, boxer shorts, khaki trousers, socks.
Real things. Well, more or less. There it is again,
that ominous rumble like the sound
of the elevated train in your bedroom if you lived
on 125th Street and Broadway, where I am not.
I am in a hammock in Umbria, and I’ve decided
that every day I spend some time in the hammock
is a victory for the human race. Behind my clothes
there are grasses, green and yellow, fields
of wheat and corn, a diagonal line of cypresses
climbing the hill. It is, for the first and last time,
six thirty on the twenty-sixth of July, 2006.
I wonder whether it will rain.

Civitella Ranieri, Umbertide, Summer 2006.

 

Comments

[geoffrey young]

great issue, david.
yours, the Hass, Bernard, Tony's, and maestro John,
among others.
rich!
thanks.
you are a victory for the human race.
geoff