AMERICANS IN AN ANCIENT LAND

We look out at green hills
worn round by centuries of feet and rain
from the terrace of a Tuscan house
cracked, weathered, moss coated,
new once, in the days of Galileo,
inherited by generation upon generation
of Strozzis then Geradescas
born within its welcoming walls.
A hand touching a Tuscan wall
knows that it is temporary, passing, vulnerable.
So many Tuscans have touched that spot before,
all of them dust now, the house accepting,
sheltering, their descendants, their guests.
In our own country, we made the walls.
The wood, the glass, the tiles
are all younger than we are.
We shaped them, put them where they are,
in a house we built on land no one had ever claimed before.
No tribes, no settlers, no Neanderthals, no one.
The mountains we see from there are jagged, pathless, raw.
No sequence, no one before us.
No context, we are all of it,
generators not inheritors,
a story at its beginning.