Winter in Latium

Once I likened us to snowdrifts
Built against life’s magic winter rivers
Then we phoned one
Another and
The metaphor got clearer
I may be a smattering of snow
Held together by
The infinitely serendipitous fortune;
The winds and shifts
Move me freely,
As fits my passions,
But you are grand and imperious.
In that winter
You are a hawk
Fury of feathers afire
Upon a mouse
Limply unnerved.
Cato the Elder
Trampling through a
Snowdrift
En route to the Senate
“Carthago delenda est”
Next summer in Carthage
I was the water that watched
A city burn
I am as I was: poetic, passionate, fluid.
You Vesuvius filled me with ash