from SEVEN MOMENTS IN ROME

Rome is a crimson war horse

you rode from under me, leaving me 

the dust of the Pantheon.

Inside the Pantheon’s snow-white eyeball, silent

beneath its gaze, I’m one of many.

Snow vies with snow on the horizon, entering this huge empty eye,

flashing silver blood spots, the horsebelly I just lost.

—Where are you, dear archangel,

lovers by the million bask beneath the horsebelly as snow drifts over Rome.

Shield if you please that sexual pose with your sword’s light.

Dust in the end, all dust.

The stone blocks of the Pantheon speak for dust, these jade-gold stones,

the strongest dome we’ve dared above ourselves.

The wood of the east soon crumbles into dust,

and then dust’s sculpture.

Not yet dust, stone clarifies dust,

just as sculpture, say Duchamp’s Large Glass,

stands before it.

Having lost their way in a gilded wind 

the Pantheon is a posture 

for Romans to present themselves to dust, 

for the gods to see them so,

sedate, honest, unhasty, building a path toward purity.

Self-knowledge shows respect, like swallows on a high-speed road.

It erects for the whole planet a pupil of stone,

isolate in mid-air,

addressed by rain and snow.

Inside its eye, we’re this crowd,

dark, primitive, barbaric.