Quintains For Claude Raines

I’ve never been to Sicily, and yet it’s always felt a part of me. Who knows? Another life, another alphabet? Alongside Archimedes, jotting prose in Agrigentum I, with each vignette, imbibing wine, as bitter as regret, harangued the hellene farmers, stoning crows. That Greek me – did I tend (as now) to get frustrated when my verse was ‘on the nose’, all too transparently in Homer’s debt? But Italy’s a credible coquette, more winning in her ways than we suppose. Like Rhapsody in Blue’s smooth clarinet, she captures us. We victims, in love’s throes, admire her steely claws, as black as jet. Written October 11, 2022