What did I see

when I first stepped up

to Paris from the metro at Montmartre?

 

What moved

in the light among the shadows

in the columns of Saint Peter’s?

 

What whispered

in the light of Interlaken

when crossing the Brienzersee?

 

Why so many miles?

 

Why the discomfort

and tedious lines that thinned

until I was alone

on a rock shattering the Mediterranean?

 

Why so many conductors

recording the course of my name?

 

Why so much motion

when my hoofs were content to remain slippered

and cuddled on the couch?

 

A donkey crossed a dirt road

behind a church in Segovia.

His hoofs and snout

were the color of the land.

He was laden with stones,

and was completely content.

 

In Paris the sun

woke a jenny asleep

beneath a bridge on the Seine.

She was happy.

She had no place to go.

She stopped to ask questions

no one has time to ask.

She took me to see her friends

gathered on the bank,

and we laughed,

and lamented the sadness of change.

 

From the gypsies in Venice

I expected to hear the same,

but they didn’t want to talk.

They offered to read my future,

and I offered to read theirs.

 

I wanted to see

how they all fit inside me.

I wanted to see

what my hoofs had created

with different hopes and dreams.

 

I walked and I walked and I walked,

and did what the natives did.

 

I wonder what I have learned?

 

Was the answer spelled

in a pattern of bubbles

splashed on a sidewalk in Rome?

 

Was it whispered

in the song

of a fountain in Seville?

 

At times a voice will call.

It is an image or an echo

rising from a night in Namur,

lingering on a street in Siena,

or whistling in the wind at Cérbère.

 

And though I go home now,

a part of me still waits

at an interminable light in Madrid,

or continues in the rain,

stepping through the past

on the stones of Mycenae.