on never reaching bolzano 

I am trying to capture

                        what is easily forgotten

what I have already forgotten

what demands forgetting

and what would have preferred

                                                remembering.

This dance is slow, slower than usual,

and the snow is no longer snow,

and what we all took for granted, well,

                        we all know what happened to that.

But if this sounds like an elegy, it shouldn’t.

Let’s get in the car and drive.

Let’s climb up the mountain and remain motionless

                                    with fear

above the tree line.

            Let’s lose sight of the main roadway

and feel

lost, utterly lost.

Let’s meander back, by all means.

            Let’s visit your aunt’s tomb in Vienna

and come face to face

                                    with a life

that no one understands and an illness

            that never should have happened

and the resulting doomed love

                                                that none foresaw,

and derive no wisdom

from any of it.

Let’s give it up altogether and take our inheritance

            and spend it in spades before we realize

that there was never any inheritance to spend

at all

                                                that way,

we will wind up exactly,

            where we started, and remember only,

what could never be foretold.

(2021)