A travelogue:

Although penguins seem to like it

there are no Polar bears on Antarctica.

Not that it's too cold. It's a question of migration.

The requiem mass isn't meant to be cold.

But to the dead it is.

The High Mass for the dead isn’t sung on Antarctica

because it’s too cold for the organ's pipes, and besides

it's a problem to manipulate fingers beneath such mittens.

––For a brief moment she was cold as ice.

This was largely due to my awkwardness.

She was young and so was I.

I remember her dress patterned with butterflies

and her black sneakers. We were bike riders and

dressed for the occasion.

When I entered the ranks of neighborhood altar boys 

she was out. No girls allowed and you'd be hard-pressed

to find a girl who had an interest,–– and besides, 

it wasn’t their time. It was the time for Priests and confessions

and rebellious explorations and during an afternoon on a cloudless day

among the stiff meadow grass, we were amused by the old-timers betting in their Italian excesses at the rails of the bocce lanes, and in the far

distant future the backlit screens of the frantic machines would come

to announced to the world: "William is with Christina Bellaragazza".