In Bologna my wife studies a menu at a street-side café looking as lovely and
self-possessed as the swifts circling the nave of the sixth century church while
medieval organs groan because we are in the city of the West's oldest university
and inquisitive nature is a minyan including mine now watching us age and
grow more beautiful with time as the stone and tile and the stained glass do
in this home of the young where Mozart came at fourteen as did so many others
I could name if only I had loved them half as much as I love this woman and the
birds circling as the rings of fragrance rise and seek their dissolution into heaven.