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.

Rome has set on the sun,
Spreads the rays of its streets
And the warmth of its torches.
Caesar commands nightfall come,
To make florid incense and wine
And talk as one full of the moon.

Her dark hair falls like the lowered trumpets,
Soundless as the eyelid-close of Accursed Gates,
Past the city’s outer walls and alley-clotted throes,
Some shield-hearted soldier sent to his earthen fold,
Her blood-rimmed sky-lids of night foretell the phantom peace
Of Autumn like a head sinking down with the fell-purpled leaf of war.

***
Love, you once guided the black looms of Autumn,
Olive-skinned druid, you are a dark everything,
And a toss of your hair flings to dust all of Rome.

Moon of Pythagorus, such proofless arithmetic derived,
No sigmoidal curves or cold calculus of the divine,
But pale barbarian, war-bringer of straight lines,
Your sea drifts commandeered like lit ash-spears in line,
Or the thrashing of wind-whipped rags of horses’ manes.
Moon of Pythagorus, the phantasms of your campfires
Of waiting armies flicker like fireflies along the stream.

Burn me, Moon, with your fire-tongued spears,
Your haunt of horses, unbridled and reared,
Burn an eye through my heart like the oculus of the Pantheon,
So I can see my pulse beat against the ash of naked footsteps
Of those who make false shrine to me.

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.

I make my grave in her dark treason of hair,
Fragrant master of soldiers and memories,
Bei capelli, conspiracy of internecine curls.
Her upbraidings strangle all my sweet nothings
To breathless wish of the emperor-purple of lips.

Flow then like black gloss of birds
And the brood hatchlings of shadow, exiled eastward,
Fled like a premonition of warmth somewhere far off,
While the wine-colored blood spills his heart into a throng of mouths.

Love, you are the hardest grave,
Were you ever just a kiss
Or always from daggers made?

The dead lie like Rome,
Like toppled sunshine in stone,
From a boy who had blown
Into the seashell of the Forum,
Heard back in restoning, the alley of home,
The narrow, basket-flowered angiportum…
But, lips too strong, let out unknown
The stone-witherings of Medusa
And the bone dust of empire.