No traffic today, it’s winter
and I am here without you.

The sea grey as slate
falling away off the continent,

inflamed with the high phosphoresce
of commerce storming the shore.

The saturnine sky spilt across,
that last tumultuous symphony.

A carport greets us vast as a tidal plain,
me and the anonymous crowd
without you, dense as pestilence.

And the monastery where the monks chanted and prayed
is a gift shop now.

Sculpted clay China-made.
Let’s runaway here, you pled.

Five Euros to ascend the bell tower?
From the arbiter of ascension:

a pretty, indifferent girl reading Calvino.
A plaid skirt, high boots like the high water line
after a biblical flood.

I pay and ascend.

Invisibly, the liturgical smell of a candle, extinguished.
You are that young girl
pulling down her panties
in a Midwestern chapel

to reveal the body and blood, the
vespers and vapors, those monochromatic whispers

out the small spherical windows:
only the plaintive sea, silently thrashing.

Far out there, the heavy barnacled hull
of a tanker and a cruise.

A gaggle of American boys
chant and bark their hymns.
The shopping mall monks
in their florescent Nike and Disney.

I descend the claustrophobic stairs,
lit well by humming modern lights,
sneak past the pretty girl with her book,
through the gift shop catacombs,

and emerge alone on the briny threshold.

I think only my longing for you remains
untarnished by the long dick of communal desire.