Maybe the darkest things are the truest things,
Death, the redoubtable lover of all, the atom bomb
Burns beneath cherry blossoms of closed eyelids,
A magnolia grove of forever fasting lips of the dead,
Pompeii and Hiroshima, twin lovers of rupture,
Graves of the wind now, keepers of nothing and all.

Do you have eyes, old man, as airy as the sky?  
Do the trees grow through your eyes, old man?  
Do the starry leaves of your mind grow old with you?

Love, if it were told how little truth you hold,
How diadems and stars are less than twinkling souls,
How anyone can fill your mercurial fancy in the fold,
How you lie before God and you lie with man,
Love, books are less old than your falsehoods,
Or the rood and the rose.

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.