I want you to know that I did it: I survived.

I climbed the 184 steps to the rectangle of a home built into the bones of a castle. It was my wife’s delight to have such a view—Portovenere Bay in the Gulf of Poets. I obliged, though feared for my back as I was, too, her stevedore and carried her 50-pound suitcase up the 17 flights of stairs. Broke a wheel by San Pietro, awestruck at this medieval church built upon an ancient pagan shrine to Venus, then up the last uneven stone steps beyond Lord Byron’s Grotto—where later we swam within the craggy bowl—and found our way to our rocky abode on the cliffs of her DreamField. Friends joined us, younger than us by almost half, and they kept me going up and down those stairs. Then a pilgrimage hike to nearby Corniglia, where my app said we climbed 154 floors along the steep vineyard terraces and wilds of Cinque Terre.

I am stronger than I thought, though not without her dreams.

Marcus Elman

is a yoga and fitness therapist working mostly with the elder/sage population in Southern California. Also a dancer and poet, he is curious about energy, how things work and get repaired, and the idea of redemption.

As a young dancer in the late 1980s, he collaborated four years with French artist Michel Costiou in the artist’s studio in Paris, on experimental movement. In their common search to activate and awaken energy, they redefined and shaped the art studio as a laboratory of experimental movement and painting. Three of Costiou’s artworks appear in Elman’s debut poetry chapbook, Because the World Is Spinning (September 2024).

Elman’s poem “The Boulevards of Los Angeles” received an honorable mention in Beyond Baroque’s 2017 annual poetry prize and was published in the textbook Method & Mystery: A Research-Based Guide to Teaching Poetry (The Poetry Salon, 2019). “The Crossing” was shortlisted for the Into The Void Poetry Prize 2020. His poems have been published in Cultural Daily [see links below], in MacQueen’s Quinterly, and in three volumes of Sunbeams: The Joan Ramseyer Memorial Poetry Anthology (2018, 2019, and 2020). He is a graduate of American River College, UC Davis, and Pepperdine.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Marcus Elman: Two Poems from his book, Because the World Is Spinning, in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 24, 30 August 2024)

⚡ Marcus Elman: Two Poems in Cultural Daily (5 January 2023): “The Prosciutto Ambulance” and “The Offering”

⚡ The Boulevards of Los Angeles in Cultural Daily (26 September 2018)