The Sleeping Dogs of Erice

Stanley Plumly

At half-a-mile the thirty marble churches and cobbled

marble streets feel light as air above the sky-blue depths

of the Tyrrhenian, feel able, in fact, to float as on the platform

of the mountain of a cloud, La Montagna del Signore,

though the plural would make more common sense

since the gods of the many mountains around the Mediterranean

have each had their day conquering the history of the island,

arriving in a morning fog from sea on a schedule fit for war.

Right now, first light, the night ghosts of the air have risen

off the sea or fallen from sky or both at once, it doesn't matter --

from this balcony it's as if we have ascended into life

in a wholly different way, purer in the purity of il velo di Venere.

It will take all morning for the mist to disappear,

especially from the slick stones of medieval village paths

that still pass for streets and the shining stained-glass windows

so bright they'll stop the sunlight until the afternoon --

which is when I see them first, curled up for naps

in an awkward weedy courtyard, four stories down, spaced

as if assigned. Six of them at least, though their numbers tend

to change, depending on the day and where they trail,

usually at the edges of the town: which is when I see them running,

sometimes chasing, sometimes playing, but always together,

but not always, because the large dog lying or sleeping in the traffic

of the Piazza Umberto, is, I'm sure, at heart, one of them --

lean the way these hunters are living off the land:

the kind, when I was a kid in the country of Ohio, we called strays,

dogs who'd been let out from the backs of trucks or cars to die

or survive, burned with sores and starving. These, though, are Italians,

Sicilians, who understand the value of community and numbers,

the civilizing forces of the pack, so that when I see them now

at different times at different intermissions, nuzzling or mating,

I'd swear they know themselves, the mythic body back

to the nursing loving founding of Old Rome, mist turned into stone.

And stone turned, inevitably, to ruin, back into mist. These dogs

are ruins, quarried, cut to shape, interchangeable through time,

ghosts of ghosts, the blood-veined lily and lilac color of white marble.