OK.
This next poem came from a summer
when I was traveling in Sicily.
I had always wanted to visit the city of Pompeii
since I'd seen it on a NOVA especially when I
was a little girl.
And it was horribly hot in Italy.
I disembarked from the train, and this weird thing
happened, where I got my ticket, I walked into Pompeii--
and you have to remember that this
is a city that would take days and days to actually explore,
for those of you who haven't been there.
I walked into the city, and there was no one there.
It was just me in the city.
Which is bizarre, because I think
something like 2.5 million people visit it every year.
So it's me in this city, wandering around,
and the sense of history was so tangible.
It was a really resonant moment.
So this poem comes from that.
It's called "Water Clocks."
"The singing of the blind school children
and the Mediterranean's flat expanse
are metaphors for every kind of solitude made forgivable
by time.
The hillside museum, with rows of empty earthen vessels,
is full of it.
A stillness so replete it resembles
something like intimacy.
A fullness only partially fathomed.
Like water clocks and sundials that
allowed time to be translated into elements, droplets,
shadows, and the laughter of bathers from the spiaggetta.
The train stops just outside of Naples,
where I buy a glass of cold juice squeezed from tangerines
and walk into Pompeii.
I couldn't have imagined the magnitude of it.
Brilliant pillars flush with sky,
temples where sunlight streams white and seems to radiate
from inside the stones.
Certain histories require forgetfulness,
others strict belief.
But I think some histories live us.
In the higher cities of the brain,
even the speechless ones are burning."