When she folds into me and weeps,
The world of empty things falls into me
Like the wetness of July in antiquated Rome,
Mother of tears, Mater Lachrymarum, in Forum stone,
The rain-addled veneers of Octavia’s portico.

Gather up these black sickened bellies of ruins,
Turn them out to make hunger the den of the skies,
Let the cracked whisper of each monument and temple
Breathe as Caesar, in unending stillness like a bare road.

A road is the sadness of seeing our beginning
But knowing love its far-off end is foretold.

The scrimshaw of the air, the long whales-tooth of sunlight
Etched with seafarer’s care and his great wantonness for the sea,
A kiss as light as the bottlenose dolphin cresting from the water,
Then night undressed and falling down like sliding beads of watery stars
From the wet coriaceous porpoise skin and a tail of silver fire.

Snow is but listening silence,
Sent from our dark past,
Inaudible ghosts made visible
In the butterfly net of cold.

Sunset whispers to itself
~No time outlives time~
The meltemi winds crackle the wild millet,
Graze-feed upon the stalks of Greek plains,
The pelican scoops up the honeyed Aegean,
Waves of sunlit anise and almond in refrain,
Vestigial as the sweet persimmon from Egypt,
The hammered warmth from the flat anvil of Africa,
Sunset whispers to itself
~No time outlives time~

They said passing by me that they would put out their eyes,
The clouds did as they died across the battlefield,
As the gauzy horses stanched the wept blood,
As the thorns, gnats, and briers, wound into
A dove’s nest of bayonets and knives,
The clouds died in insurrection,
And the night breathed freely and the stars cleared the mud.

Love is not a maturation of voices to the more sublime,
But sotto voce, an undertow of groping intonations,
The sod of soil hearts cast across the reaping sea.

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.