From the forthcoming Fall of America Journals, a quiet moment, Allen Ginsberg in Italy, musing and notating outside the famous Leaning Tower of Pisa
The Leaning Tower
of Pisa’s nine marble stories/in sunset in white stone in
a field of green/grass surrounded by Sunday families./1967 A.D,
still stands while I sit/ crosslegged smoking & laughing &
soldiers sing, phantoms of the hilarious legions/trooping up
and down the circular stairs/ and traipsing dizzily around
tiny balconies/ slant spiral since thirteenth century,/surveying
restaurants & Baptistry of Duomo/ and angular streets’ rhomboidal
houses – white white, white six floors of columned/ archways
emblemed with carved diamonds/ & Corinthian flowers slowly charming
grey clouds by their odd lean, tipped over pink tile/ roofs
on the floor of the empty blue sky.