Mountains as they rise

  Friends said, No, skip the Carven show.
  It's all about the street. What use is
  that to you?

  I remembered then, seeking Petrarca as
  a youngster, chasing rumors of torment
  to be ready for with words, and leaping
  headlong into his lap, exhausted, OK,
  slow down. He never does. I find I owe
  him, certain peaks:


  Perhaps I could become a stone somehow ..

  adamant, perhaps, or marble - white
  with fear - or else rock crystal that men
    admire
  At any rate, the weight I can barely stand

  to carry of my burden of desire
  would lift: I envy Atlas with his light
  load of the sky in Morocco's burning sand.

Petrarch
Sonnets and Shorter Poems
  rima sparse, 51
  fragment
  ca 1350
David R. Slavitt
  translation
Harvard University Press, 2012©

Bram Valbracht
  Carven, 2014
  Paris