Far Afield

seashells

The lines start in the middle and curve inwards with arms outstretched. She breaks the shell; yesterday’s dinner. You see them on the churches and building façades and I was supposed to look up their meaning. Poseidon’s jewels, I thought. Sharp at the bottom and smooth at the top like the rounded arches representing the skies and the triangular patterns grounding us to the Earth. The dualistic meaning of the shell escaping me at the time because I envisioned them buried under the sea.

But that’s not it either. They tell me that they signify the pilgrims because the lines inside of the shells all converge at one point. I was wrong, they don’t stretch out. They come from different corners of the world to meet in one sacred place. They conjoin at a single point, a series of radii in a semi-circle meeting at the epicenter. That’s the mathematician’s interpretation.

niji no oku
tama no kyuusai
hikaru kin

somewhere over the rainbow
the soul’s salvation
glistening gold


scythe

We leave the familiar tune of the Campo de Fiori to go church-hopping. That’s the official term the professor uses. “I can’t compete with the Roman Catholic Church,” says he. How the Empire, too, could not compete in the end. I look around at the missing layers of marble, Christian icons and new functions assigned to places that once held a drastically different meaning and contained another faith. Recycled stories, gods removed. A statue of a saint placed on top of Trajan’s column of glory, a monument of immortality diminished into a mere pedestal.

We are all mortal. The stacked skulls and pieces of vertebrae speak these words to me. Above me, the angel of death holding its trademark harvesting tool. A student walks up to the Italian cashier and calls the remains great teachers of life. She tells him that no, they were monks. Literal interpretation.

ue mitara
douyou shisezu
hone nokori

way up high
the remains
that do not disturb me

silence

The pigeon flies to the other side now. I am on a scavenger hunt. Feather between the rocks, feather in the grass, feather on the lower step beneath the arch. A space enclosed by meditation and the sound of a fountain in the middle: four kinds of drips. Stones crunch beneath my feet and one faucet flows unevenly. Perhaps I will find what I have lost here in the imperfect details of nature.

The plump nun behind us chats quickly in Italian, mono-tonal language. I can’t tell if she’s angry or happy. Airplanes we never see fly over our heads. There is a small gift store right in the hallway and a man answers his cell phone behind me. His wife asks him about his whereabouts and he responds about work. Who keeps their vows of silence? We pay to get in.
Flutters. I look up at the winged angels. I am not an interpreter of signs.

oku na machi
itsuka no uta ni
kiita koto

there’s a land that I heard of
once in a lullaby