The shanties of the shore are the tide’s wives in clay,  
The uxorious sea fawns at the blushed lips of the beach,
A serenade from the sung-exhalations of all living things,
Though eternity is the stillness of silence repeating.

All is gone, all my kingdoms, all my sons,
All of valor, all of disenchanted love, but for eyes
That see the world of nothing, slow in its demise.

The ancient way across this world lies like sunset over black pearls,
The treetops are marble-made that the riffler of wind deforms,
To know all mother tongues from the quarry of rough stones,
To speak everything at once, Bride of Unbecoming,
The moldering walls of lips, the kiss of vacant streets
And the quiet, wet solitude bespoken by back roads,
The whispered origami of the Forum, paper gods in folds,
Smothered in the false pillows of their own repose,
The wolf’s beard dipped in the fresh pant of dewfall,
While lovers have placed on the stones of the Appian Way
Their perfect hearts like votive candles, cupping the flames,
Looking down the swift arrow of loneliness, Sagittarius its same
Heaven-glow and besprinkled guidepost of a starlit Sacred Way.
Mother of Rome, your powdered face has been made ashen by those
Unreturned home, your far-off travels lead only to the graves of sons.
The ancient way across this world lies like sunset over black pearls.

Every Autumn, the sky a little more to stone belongs,
The immovable strata of deciduous columnar clouds,
Every leaf that falls, Rome a little more to earth’s heart recalls.

The finger upon whose weight
Depends the pluck of the string,
Does pull back the folds of a drape
Of sunwashed loneliness in afternoon.
Windows drift through you, without home,
Without glass, or any warmth from looking through.
Life in its squared sequence does amass, ecumenical,
Until death its finger does pass in its final pluck
As the touch of the thundering universe.

There the floating scholar of green lines read,
There the shading peasant of sun-fields plowed,
There the fleeing empress of coral red gowns,
There the graying knight of frost-broken vows.
A tree is a haunted ruin of bare limbs and rooms.

But thought scurries around like a five-lined skink
With its tail shimmering blue as oil floating on water.

She kept bed-side by me all along,
Her prayer like a flower behind my ear,
Asleep, I think I hear the petals fall.