where the lights on the hill gleaming in the rain

are the lights that children bathe by, and it is time

to go home now—to drinks, to love, to supper,

to the modest places which contain our lives.

THE GARDEN ON THE CAMPAGNA

Noon—and the shadows of the trees

have fallen from the branches. The frail

blue butterflies still flutter hungrily

among the weeds, and a few pale flowers

climb up the yellow hill and fade away.

The scarred brown lizards lie immobile

in the dust. A line of ants

picks clean the carcass of a frog.

Only the smallest things survive

in this exhausted land the gods

so long ago abandoned. Time

and rain have washed the hero’s face

from off the statue. The sundial

stands perpetually in shade.

The bankrupt palace still remains

beyond the wall that summer builds,

doors bolted shut, the roof caved in,

the ancient family without heirs,

and one half-blind old man who sits

each day beside the empty pond

mumbling to himself in dialect.

The village boys throw stones at him,

but he will never leave, and there

is no one left who knows if he

was once the servant or the sire.

MOST JOURNEYS COME TO THIS

an Italy of the mind

—WALLACE STEVENS

I.

Leave the museums, the comfortable rooms,

the safe distractions of the masterpiece.

The broken goddesses have lost their voice,

the martyr’s folded hands no longer bless.

Footsteps echo through the palaces

where no one lives. Consider what you’ve come for.

Leave the museums. Find the dark churches

in back towns that history has forgotten,

the unimportant places the powerful ignore

where commerce knows no profit will be made.

Sad hamlets at the end of silted waterways,

dry mountain villages where time

is the thin shadow of an ancient tower

that moves across the sundazed pavement of the square

and disappears each evening without trace.

Make the slow climb up the winding alleys.

Walk between houses shuttered close for midday

and overhear the sound of other lives,

the conversations in the language you

will never learn. Make the long ascent

up to the gray stone chapel on the hillside

when summer is a furnace open to the world,

and pause there breathless in the blinding sun

only one moment, then enter.

For this

is how it must be seen to understand:

by walking from the sunlight into darkness,

by groping down the aisle

as your wet skin cools and your eyes adjust,

by finding what you’ve come for thoughtlessly,

shoved off into a corner, almost lost

among the spectacle of gold and purple.

Here in the half-light, covered by the years

it will exist. And wait,

wait like a mirror in an empty room

whose resolutions are invisible

to anyone but you. Wait like the stone

face of a statue waits, forever frozen

or poised in the moment before action.

II.

But if the vision fails, and the damp air