Poor Nietzsche in Turin, eating sausage his mother
Mails to him from Basel. A rented room,
A small square window framing August clouds
Above the mountain. Brooding on the form
Of things: the dangling spur
Of an Alpine columbine, winter-tortured trunks
Of cedar in the summer sun, the warp in the aspen’s trunk
Where it torqued up through the snowpack.
“Everywhere the wasteland grows; woe
To him whose wasteland is within.”
Dying of syphilis. Trimming a luxuriant mustache.
In love with the opera of Bizet.