Rome - life, art, stones - Travel Series

Today in Rome, heading down

Michelangelo’s Spanish Steps,

under an unchanging moon,

I held on to the balustrade,

grateful for his giving me a hand.

All for love, I stumbled over the past

as if it were my own feet. Here, in my twenties,

I was lost in love and poetry. Along the Tiber,

I made up Cubist Shakespearean games.

I played with an ignorant mirror for an audience:

myself, embroiled with personage

from Antony and Cleopatra. Delusions of grandeur!

They were for a time my foul-weather friends—

as once I played with soldiers

on the mountainous countryside of a purple blanket.

Stanley Moss, “Return to Rome” from A History of Color: New and Collected Poems. 

http://www.sevenstories.com/