For the Girl Lying on Her Back in a Field of Yellow

The road is all switchbacks and tour busses leaving the ruins of San Galgano. A place where cameras flit and click, clumsy, in their attempt to capture some perfect image of the unfinished church whose grand skeleton steals breath from even the most cynical.  Or could it be the Italian children whose words, untranslatable to us, become, instead, gold-bellied sparrows that zip along the fields so close their wings touch the tall stalks. But they do not falter. In my youth, I loved fields like these, where the great green wave called me first to a hush, then to a crouch and a reach, as I picked one single stalk and brought it to my mouth, cradling it between my pressed palms. As if kneeling in prayer, I brought my mouth to my hands, that I might kiss the green and, breathing out, make song.  Now, I walk the steep incline toward a small hilltop church famed for housing a sword in a stone. But I am not thinking of the boulder penetrated with forged steel. Instead, I am noticing how quickly the words and syllables vanished from my throat in these moments, just now, after learning that I am her first lover. Since. Below us, the children have doubled in number and begin to unsheathe instruments, like weapons, thrust across backs and shoulders, for a sunset concert in the ruined church. How innocent, those who make music for the gods. Beyond their small bodies, a row of trees planted to combat erosion and a patchwork of yellow. In Germany, I learned, fields of yellow are rapeseed, produced for their oil. But here, at San Galgano, rape is another thing completely, and as I look to her supple body I dream that I might plant seeds in her that will grow roots sinuous enough to stop her erosion. That I can be the one to wield an instrument of peace, and that, should I pull the sword from the stone once we reach the crest, I will know the miracle of how a spirit can survive that kind of breaking.