I was moseying about town in the late afternoon

the time when the sun shines oblique.

And the golden glow is a gauze in crystalline blue

in my minds imagining Florentine.

I’ve never seen only dreamed

but seems to ethereally resonate in me,

A violin’s back of little ice aged wood.

Vibration caused perhaps by what tips

the heart songs,

a drop of the Arno,

a drop of the Tuscan wine,

a drop of a cousin’s blood

maybe Galileo?

I grasped a handy bench

just before time fell on me

and took me back.

That predator!

Returning to its den

with its scrawny catch.

Where it came to me I was far away

surrounded by stony Cambridge,

but luck still in my own past.          

Forced to consider the plurality of my worlds

by the poet sitting besides me,

“Lime and limpid green, a second scene”.

He recently released from hospital

and his self incarcerating dreams

gladly showed me my own night’s vast plains,

(and the women of East Anglia less possessed)

as they intersected the valleys and mountains of my mind.

Just as Galileo showed another poet,

(who may once have sat up on this very revolutionary bench,

postured, butt of flatulent airs released on the top rail

whilst his muddy boots rested on the seat),

a landscape that tangled up his time.

Dawning on me that Sisyphus

defies the Gods pushing his weight.

As we sometimes with just cause

rebel similarly though doomed to fail

returning to the lower realm over our perceived existence.

But for a brief moment we, like our hero, reach an apex,

a place where our lens can clearly view our rightful paradise,

un-obscured by the history

of failed revolutions and returning stones

placed up on us,

so that Milton may achieve Galileo.

And I?

my poet.