-Sofia in Pescara-

I'm a digital friend

more than twice the age

of a digital friend I can not reach.

Inside the little square where friends in stasis

gather at the edge of illumination, the young

Sofia from Pescara, Italy, rests an elbow
at the bar, entering brightly day by day.

Perhaps as a child her family
was much like my family;

her father’s house

much like my father’s house

at a time when I was young,

much younger than she is now;

house like a beehive.

Maybe we ranged from grapevine

to grapevine, we two;

played beneath the morning's

clotheslines and navigated

the crazy entries linking the outside

and the inside,–– the continents

and the years running between us.

She was far from born as I batted-down the sour

green apples from a neighbor's tree with a broomstick,

running for cover into the junkyard with my stash.

Maybe we crossed the same kinds of

weathered fences to the same kinds of vegetable gardens

where our grandfathers sprayed the swollen

hornworms, feasting on the same early tomatoes.

Over there,–– at the benches

beneath the shade of the tangled vines,

maybe the old men from Pescara drank their fill

of home-pressed reds as dry as their beards,
much the same as my grandfather and his friends,

in much the same kind of territory.

Sofia from Pescara, leans

her elbow on the bar in the square at the

edge of illumination, unreachable, yet day-by-day,

at the margins of my screen she enters

my space of time to introduces herself.

3/12/12