WINE COUNTRY

 

We ride by flowers we think follow the sun’s arc

   by the hour, but each time we pass them,

 

they’ve turned away from us. I’m here on a tour

  from a friend’s army base up the road.

 

Among us: a man-on-leave who already got drunk

  at the wine tasting and his wife who poses

 

for every picture in a Florentine straw hat until

  it sails from her head down a row of vines.

 

She reminds me of what I could be if I cared enough,

  if I let spirits uplift me like an American flag,

 

but I’m here because I’ve tired of that backyard view

  where small animals haul ivy between their teeth,

 

reorganizing their nests like pictures on a wall.

  In one state, I’ve moved the same print

 

through four apartments: its Arles sky and dotted fields

  like these Tuscan farmers have replanted

 

with sunflowers to make oil for the season of Lent.

  Back home, my oils dry in their metal tubes; 

 

the easel leans, folded in a corner. Another man

  has left my body’s wick for a case of wine.

 

I’ve packed his books and sent them to his mother,

  who will read them next to his hospital bed.

 

The wife now boasts that she ships her husband

  boxes of tissue—a luxury where he’s stationed.

 

We’ve grown quiet, our heads heavy in the afternoon.

  Later, I will read that only younger blooms

 

count the days like a slow transgression, whereas

  the mature are content to face one direction.

 

But here, the landscape breathes like the sea

  before a storm, and I am no part of it—

 

any more than the one who’ll stumble back

  to his desert tent, or the painter who returns,

 

every night, to a memory inside a locked room.