How agreeable it is not to be touring Italy this summer, <br />wandering her cities and ascending her torrid hilltowns. <br />How much better to cruise these local, familiar streets, <br />fully grasping the meaning of every roadsign and billboard <br />and all the sudden hand gestures of my compatriots. <br /> <br />There are no abbeys here, no crumbling frescoes or famous <br />domes and there is no need to memorize a succession <br />of kings or tour the dripping corners of a dungeon. <br />No need to stand around a sarcophagus, see Napoleon's <br />little bed on Elba, or view the bones of a saint under glass. <br /> <br />How much better to command the simple precinct of home <br />than be dwarfed by pillar, arch, and basilica. <br />Why hide my head in phrase books and wrinkled maps? <br />Why feed scenery into a hungry, one-eyes camera <br />eager to eat the world one monument at a time? <br /> <br />Instead of slouching in a café ignorant of the word for ice, <br />I will head down to the coffee shop and the waitress <br />known as Dot. I will slide into the flow of the morning <br />paper, all language barriers down, <br />rivers of idiom running freely, eggs over easy on the way. <br /> <br />And after breakfast, I will not have to find someone <br />willing to photograph me with my arm around the owner. <br />I will not puzzle over the bill or record in a journal <br />what I had to eat and how the sun came in the window. <br />It is enough to climb back into the car <br /> <br />as if it were the great car of English itself <br />and sounding my loud vernacular horn, speed off <br />down a road that will never lead to Rome, not even Bologna.<br /><br />Billy Collins<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/consolation/
