Maremma
Luxuriating in therapeutic thermal springs
affords a reprieve from a fortnight of tramping
across quondam marshes, through sunflower fields
and vineyards, past hay bales and cypresses.
The mind craves downtime to absorb stimuli
and coalesce the landscape’s specters
lingering in the shards of Etruscan artisanry,
loitering at the Roman Gates, lazing by windmills.
Regional memories strut along the landscape,
insinuating themselves in lockstep
with clock tower chimes, surfacing into awareness
even as hot, sulphurous waters bubble and spume.
In my lassitude I toss back my head and shut my eyes,
recalling the fish stench from when I earlier nosed
a dolium of garum meticulously preserved,
yet somehow it all seems the residue of a fugue.
Perhaps tonight, after a repast of seared sea bream
with olives, artichokes, zucchini, and kale,
after climbing nearby hills full of metals,
I will meet with Dante’s ghost at sundown.
If so, I will lay down my rucksack and inquire
where he has been and whether he ever slept overnight
on a farmhouse roof with the stars his guerdon,
then spill waterfalls of gratitude for the experience.
Lakeland
In Albion’s scenic northwest district
of fells, crags, tarns, and cairns,
nature’s pilgrims arrive in trickles and droves
to gorge themselves on breathtaking views
of dales, glens, dingles, and idyllic villages,
remote outposts of civilization
nestled amid the grandeur
of rock, water, mist, and cloud,
the romantic playground of Wordsworth,
Coleridge, Southey, Wainwright.
Hence the intrepid, begrimed with sweat, scramble
up rugged scree and clamber laminar shale
to survey from summits distant
Caledonia even as grazing Viking sheep
elude their herders and visit unannounced
upland farmers whose domains are bordered
by forests of conifers that clothe the slopes.
From Blencathra to Helvellyn to the crown
of Scafell Pike, life ever seeks out other life.
Will you too be inspired by the atypical, apical
panoramas that have drawn the Romans
and silenced men and women of letters?
They were most oft overawed while alone
at the sound of nothing, nothing but
their own heartbeats and insufflations,
and by scarce glimpses of a golden eagle
lofty over low-lying lakes, flaunting
the elegant glide of the insouciant.
In the fleeting hour of life, the spirit longs
for sights such as these, for the chance
amid wildness to scuff the earth with treads,
taking nothing but photographs, leaving nothing
but footprints, alive to marvels,
alert to the verisimilar sense that
stumbling blocks may turn steppingstones,
a lesson intuited by all comers to Cumbria.