One of those flash epiphanies of travel, the realization that worlds you'd love vibrantly exist outside your ignorance of them. The vitality of many lives you know nothing about. I could live in this town, so how is it that I've never been here before today?

Italy's siren call lures us more and more.

May summer last a hundred years.

The undulent landscape looks serene in every direction. Honey-colored farmhouses, gently placed in hollows, rise like thick loaves of bread set out to cool.

Like fanning through a deck of cards, my mind flashes on the thousand chances, trivial to profound, that converged to re-create this place. Any arbitrary turning along the way and I would be elsewhere; I would be different. Where did the expression "a place in the sun" first come from? My rational thought process cling always to the idea of free will, random event; my blood, however, streams easily along a current of fate.

Poems give you the lives of others and then circle in on your own inner world.

Five tender apricots in a blue bowl, a brief and exact promise of things to come.