Vaison-la-Romaine

Old and new lie here face to face and sweat,
Lover-like together, taste each other’s breath.
Provencal sky, green earth and terra cotta
Hold in embrace a stubble of pillars and stones.

Above, an amphitheatre drowses in the hollow of a hill.
Below, a street of ancient shops suspends
In lasting noon the business of its daily feet.

Later, canopied in a café, an English paper
Finds me out, bawling its front-page horror:
A convoy blitzed, children killed.
Papery words stretch over charred flesh and screaming nerves,
The terrible sudden-always stun of death.

From surreal screens we drink uncertainty;
Presidents straddle the globe and spin on half-truths.
Our city spreads its pixilations,
Projecting false bright angles on the world. 

Ancient marble ran with blood, I know,
Its whiteness mined by hot and secret monsters.
Even little Vaison holds its broken propaganda;
The statue of the senator’s wife
Frozen like Juno in her folds
While his cheeks leers, a Roman mafioso.
But, next to us, antique blades cleaved closer to the truth.

On the horizon pulses the Rhone, squeezing into the future
Its bright tube of autoroutes, refineries and reactors.
But here in Vaison – even now – stillness renews,
That living quiver of Provencal heat and light,
An instant density of sense, whispering:
‘There is only this moment, this body and this breath.’

Mortality sprawls beside me like a spouse,
Yawns and snores and scratches.
Lies wither in the sun.