A Supple Wreath of Myrtle

Poor Nietzsche in Turin, eating sausage his mother

Mails to him from Basel. A rented room,

A small square window framing August clouds

Above the mountain. Brooding on the form

Of things: the dangling spur

Of an Alpine columbine, winter-tortured trunks

Of cedar in the summer sun, the warp in the aspen’s trunk

Where it torqued up through the snowpack.

“Every where the wasteland grows; woe

To him whose wasteland is within.”

Dying of syphilis. Trimming a luxuriant mustache.

In love with the opera of Bizet.