The horse breathes in the city, the world of unrelenting pistons
And steam from the jingling harness, and the jangling windows
That reflect the bolting sparrows like fire arrows in the coming night,
Viennese darkness is like the smell of the chocolatier mixed with snow,
Sealed in a sachertorte with the alley-crack of the riding whip on coach,
Viennese sunshine is like the baker’s soul, rising on flashing coppers and tins.

Love not the empress curve of your cheek,
The many-storied, empty ziggurat of belief,
The man-handled, baked brick built so high,
Your grotty thighs are pasted with all your lovers,
Your lacquered heart is glazed by luminous grief,
Head-bearer of broken vases as your crown,
Filled with dry dust from liquid stars.

Snow brings to earth the ash footsteps of Titans,
Winter in its giant vacancy of bygone strides,
The overthrown birth of frost mother and sky,
~The snow proselytizes all our warm tomorrows~
But the totality of loss lies like a starved lion,
Paws crossed, staring at the cold changeling-world,
As a young white-tailed Springbok ages into distance.

These clouds of Italy are grown on vines,
Infidels of skies, fruit bearers of wine-veined
Marble, fertile in spite of its own lifeless tableau,
Here thrives the succulent garden of the alone,
Where turns aside the burnt nape of the plowman,
Voyager of the cool midnight seas of the mind,
Up to this arable vine of sighs from outworn gods,
And hears his heart once more give up its throne.

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.