Whose eloquence has been quarried

Along the Tuscan shore below Spezia,

the beach where Shelley perished,

person with protruding ears,

with humanistic urges

with festerings without of their childhoods,

wake to the canticle of the loins

in the beds in which they were born.

Person with pudgy fingers,

with moralistic intentions,

with drawn out histories of melancholy,

stir above their pizzerias

to awes and unintended consequences

from divulsioned balconies in their pajamas

gaze toward the Apuan Alps,

peaks of gleaming marble

whose oratory has been quarried

since the time of Caesar's mother.

On the hills above the vineyards,

in villages that remember the months

Michelangelo sought in each dig

the finished rock for his Moses,

they rise sniffling and spitting

whose pasts are about to arrive.

Beneath the campanile at Carrara,

mother town of the hallowed stone,

overlooking the tracks

on which the immense blocks descend,

they peer without at the day

and the discontent at the heart of things.

In the offstreet of Seravezza,

beyond the rubble and dilapidated sheds

where all those centuries

the master carvers have worked,

they call the children

and locate a watch on whatever will be.

A grandeur glows

white,

beige,

delicate green

from the jagged walls of the pit

upon the bulldozer,

already clawing at the depths

upon the arch of the slicer

and the crisscrossed cutting wires,

upon the litter of slabs

in which pietas wait.

Birds nest high up upon the ancient tiers.

Water trickles [i]or[/i] part of to the other the crevices.

A1ong the dirt road where the traffics creep down,

they are hanging their wash beside the hut

hunting mushrooms and hares upon the slopes,

whose fantasies wander anxiously,

ruefully in and on the outside of their grandfathers' lives.

Who do not care on what account the sky is blue.

Oliver Rice's piece of poetrys have appeared in numerous literary journals, greatest in quantity recently in The Georgia Review and Madison Review. of recent origin pieces are upcoming in Kansas Quarterly, The Quarterly, Pequod and of recent origin York Quarterly. He lives in Naples, Florida.

Copyright World numbers Incorporated Mar 1996

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