Far off now a city of apartments, passages
of ducted light the days grow older in.
A city of why not? and all the hours
hung bell by bell around the towns,
but the shaky earth is cracked and the core
jets out hot here. Some have little –
a chair on the street, a pack of cigarettes
to sell. Scent of basil, resin,
smell of fish, bread, stink of traffic
always on the move along the bay’s eye
losing sight in the blue haze of itself
between the mountain and the bay.
See this and die.
Out on the night water
two men fish the dark, one with a light,
one a spear. Inland Orion glints,
clearing the cliff, where the dim lamps
shine all night in the house of the dead:
Giovanni et Famiglia, Rosaria, Longobardo,
all their children folded in the drawers
stacked to the roofbeam, each a candle,
each a bell’s intermittent random tongue
counting in the saints, the packed
municipalities squabbling along the coast.
Begins father forgive me, today I learned
but one word oziosamente, asleep in the sun
among the brown stones, all the guides
to the buried town nagging in three languages.
I have been between life and life, stone
by stone in the rich dust where the lizards
are at home – Papa Lizard, his inamorata,
Where was wineshop and water gossip, oven,
mark one man left on another man’s wall
that he owed him, some inscription to a tart
she’s a sweet fig, a vine, a fruity lotus.
Caught side by side in the sudden dust:
old or young with their offspring, a slave
grinding his bad teeth, Pliny the Uncle,
townsmen, dead all as all the dead are.
Buried. Stopped rooms in which to fight,
make love, spin, dream or wake suddenly
to cockcrow and children or the other birds,
the long shush of the night sea, finished.
No one here but an old man with his ruins
muttering in the kingdom of the lizards
spent prayers to the failed gods: nothing’s
sure nor long sacred. Message ends.
I have been days, years on the road,
sinking in winter, dreaming of the south.
I am who sets out who never arrives,
arrives though he never departed, the self
always talking to the self. I am one
changed by a journey whose tale’s never true.
Therefore who is it crosses the littoral,
the wind faintly with rosemary, at night
glimpses in the cold bouillon of stars
himself? I have grown weary being part
of God’s interminable education. Again
the dark sisters whisper in the walls,
and again through the rocks the wanderer
Odysseus mast-lashed and mad unstops
his ears to the singers on the wind,
all the songs on the radio telling him
nothing so well endures as the ruin of things,
a young woman lights up an old man’s dark
but it won’t last. Not much changes.
Whatever set the slow stars in the sky,
the Plough and the Pole to steer by
and all the blue jewels of the moon
doubled in the sea with the evening star,
more to the point will I ever get home?
Roman, I’d retire to the coast from things
public, – greed, power, the grim lusts
of the merely ambitious, all the sad wants
most men have merely to be remembered.
Devious or discontent, our doings
shabby deals in an alley, cutting throats
for loose change, thereafter soon enough
retching up again on the flophouse floor.
I would retire to Ercolano, where I’d be
resident cynic, the large events so far
beyond my notion or my wish. Slowly
to my own design I’d build a good house.
Between the mountain and the sea, my nets
slung under the olives, I’d fish a little,
sleep much, contemplate the grape, take
a long view of the town’s doings and write.