The Spanish-Italian Border

When you first mentioned the villa on the Spanish-Italian border
to which we might abscond, and there live out our lives
in a utopian idyll of sun and passata,

I instantly saw in the far, far distance,
among sheep festooned with golden bells,
a whitewashed house, a vine covered trellis,
a sun-dappled patio, a lemon tree grove.

Whispering natives, with a strange patois,
their kindly gifts of dried goat, wine,
and we conversing over their heads, (I in Spanish, you in Italian),
with many accompanying gesticulations.

And somebody knitting, perhaps, in a corner,
the bony needles clacking and clicking,
as you spit on the floor and I pound the table
and one of us smashes a glass to the wall.

Friend, we are both in the heat of our lives –
let us kiss, then turn ourselves back to back,
I’ll face the Atlantic, you the Adriatic
let us each stride out for our separate countries

yet know that our hearts are sunk in wool,
bound by a skein that will never unwind
to be always connected, through our mutual love
of a fairly exclusive, unheard-of language,

that we’ll always meet up, in far flung places,
as yet unmapped, as yet unfound.