Decending

The Mediterranean blinks its huge blue eye
and settles back in the sunshine.
Clouds that had obscured my view like cataracts
gradually burn away.  I am moving too, more slowly at first,
then faster, lifting off the earth with borrowed wings,
abandoning the temples crumpled like heaps
of dirty clothes, their priests vending postcards,
miniature statues of gods, urns that turn on lazy Susans
to be devoured by a hundred-thousand eyes.  All this
the dead have seen and I am rushing away,
while the pilot spits statistics that fall from the ceiling
like pebbles into the sea.
                                             But I am ahead of myself,
forgetting how history turns cities over
like dirt behind a plow, how with a memory
deep as its roots a tree will flower and dress itself
in the same leaves, season after season, bear the same
children until its limbs ache, and the rain falls from the clouds
and follows the same highways down the rugged mountains,
merging into creeks, swelling behind dams, gathering in rivers,
rushing toward the crowded seas.
                                        And I have got to slow down,
sit at least one morning on a terrace, sip the bitter coffee
from a cup smaller than my palm, pick ripe olives
like they were coins to be spent on my tongue, maybe stroll
to the market in spite of the heat, follow the clean edge
of white-washed buildings until the clouds have become sheets
hung out fresh, to be billowed and lifted back up by a breeze.