Fall is an empty street in Rome,
Of byways of dry-leaf stone and moth-haunted hours,
Of market stalls with their over-haggled and fingered rinds,
And melons moiled over and palmed and bruised.
The light blows like once-told ripeness from the basket of fruit.

Greece burned its sins in the days of Rome,
City of wrinkled roads like the crushed pillow
From a sleeping lover who left long ago.  
The sea tends to its wool-gathering of sands.

Love is a Phoenician breeze,  
Purest abjad of Tyrian purple and royal blue,
Pillow bearer of golden consonance between kings.

Love is a Phoenician trader over deepest-sounded seas,
Far-blown nomad that still wants for the thunder of golden drums
And the rain that comes in rounded vowels of water.

Because love has no tribe but is the purest nomad.

The sky will never hold more
Than all the paths of soldiers’ unreturning,
Laid out the length of undone goodbyes.  
Their eyes that sleep on the wind,
Palace of last breath,
And the rain that falls, expectant of windows,
And those left within to live without eyes.

Blow, Lyceum grasses, blow,
From coiled lips of your wolf-god Apollo
Whose dawn-padded paws to starprints roam
This temple-tribute to thought-illumined roads.  

Blow, Lyceum grasses, blow
Of wave upon wave of your brushings-by,
From staff to sandal-fall to cloak hemline,
For rhapsodes, your song-odyssey to sew.

The Greeks built the sun,
Upon scaffolding~acrobaticon~  
With pear-skinned lightness to glow,
Or like leavened bread from the woodburning stove.

Blow, Lyceum grasses, blow,
The sun lies old on its famine-cracked pillow,
In spittle of gold and yellowed phosphorous,
With the gods past-blown to ruin.

Sound is a torchlight passed
Along the eardrum to quiver in silhouettes,
Shadow puppets of the mind.  

Stars are the torchlit soundways to the divine,
With flickerings too far to be heard
Or too much shadow-disturbed to know as sign.

The dead lie like Rome,
Like toppled sunshine in stone,
From a boy who had blown
Into the seashell of the Forum,
Heard back in restoning, the alley of home,
The narrow, basket-flowered angiportum…
But, lips too strong, let out unknown
The stone-witherings of Medusa
And the bone dust of empire.