Fall to me, all you streets of Rome,
With your embrowned oils from torched walls and breccia of shadows,
The pizzicato of stairways and afternoon slowly closed
Like the thick, leathery-echo from this book of all roads.

Fallen, smoldering empire of storefronts and back-shop heirlooms,
Your lupine hills unbound with milk of cur in the wind and woods,
To your fallow fields rowed deep by a conquest of oars,
To the deepest silence and soot-muted oneness of Pompeii,
And a sky that is an ancient coin, without worth,
But still rubbed smooth at the edges by overfond lovers.

Pure sorrow is too beautiful for this world.
Pure sadness is too human for us to feel anymore.
But grief is still a snow-covered tongue whose melting chokes and overcomes.

The immortal is the time before the rain
When we have thoughts of it afterward.  
By then, the mosaic of tongue and its words
Are broken stones swept away
By the shuttling broom of storm.

Alstroemeria, Southern-rooted watcher of the skies,
Angel tongues of Peru, with your ******-blushed annunciation
Or Incan-hued sacrificial fire.
So much like the moon tongues of all rivers in first frost or first harvest.  

Like first love, first death is the truest form,  
And blooms in scorn of all its many-mirrored rivers to come.

There in the box lives all of Christmas,
All of the serendipity of the midnight cross,
All of the iced tassels and tinsel-worn frost,
All of the gazed-upon rooftops that turn
From emptiness to stars to ever-wondering thoughts.
All of my boyhood eyes are closed now
With those in the box.

The desert is not the grave of the sea.

The heaving reign of pharaohed seas,
Rule in bloodline of palm wine and embalming fluid of brine.
The tides are their mummified lips,
Whispering the coming forth of spells eternally to the sky.  
All goddesses, like shawled Isis, in lamentations of hair
And past-wept somnolence for Egypt,
Lie across the heart-bound murmur of waters
From their dead kings and the kingly divine, Amun-Ra,
Whose bird-starred eyes fill the canopic jar of the cosmos.

The sea is the grave of the desert.

Brother, our young summers held us in a long chain like the phalanx of bronzed soldiers forward flung,
And the lion was skinned and hung out to dry like the sunned-fur of the beach at Marathon.
Brother, help me to dream again.

Brother, our yellowed days shook us like serried Hoplites of an atomic age,
Shoulder to shoulder, friction rubbed, all ranks split from the fissioned-flanks.
Brother, help me to dream again.

Storm-footed Titans of heat, dust, and irradiated wind pry from a ruptured Tartarus,
The flanks are an open pulse; the scorch-song thirsts for its sea-cooling to stone.
Brother, the lion lives that wears your skull around its mane.

Brother, dream of me again, of Persian arrows and lances,
And my fallen eyes instead of yours pouring in
With a sea of lavender water and mists
And summers of once-were.