Back of book

From Chapter One: Places

THE FOUNTAIN OF TREVI

“Enzo!”
                   “Fabrizio!”
                                      “Cafone!”

A brat wades into the basin to retrieve the coins, sopping shoes, pants and shirt, immemorial and clutchy.

Mothers and fathers and fathers and mothers are bawling out their slippery kids or wetting them with juicy-lipped kisses.

And now a fresh damp load of heated tourists. The cameras salute the statues.

Boys ogle ogled girls. Somebody is selling pictures of exactly what we’re all looking at.

The Fiats and Lambrettas fart into the hubbub, the walls and shops of the piazza echo the smelly sputter, our lungs turn black.

Legs dangle as we sit tier on tier; my feet in their sandals ache like African troopers.

The bearded generation in undershirts and tatters glower or sleep artistically or munch a crust; the girls look as if their thoughts if any are fatal.

Suddenly a Midwesterner has offered a horse-and-buggy man three thousand, who insists like a spinning record on five, he doesn’t work winters, the polyester wife is miserably embarrassed, they get off, I can’t see who won, the bald head sweats with anger, the horse clobbers off.

A small policeman launches a monstrous quarrel with five men, they’re having a grand time, like movie Italians, the kids are yelping to help the quarrel along.

The foreigners are gazing, wonderstruck, at the Fontana,

At the imperious god

The pointed finger

The Triton storming the steeds, the uprushing outrushing steeds, the imagined clamor of the conch,

Noble the cascade, the leaping stone noble.

Somebody is adding figures on a pad, the day’s expenses, and picking his nose with the pencil’s tiny eraser; his eyes bob from the figures to the Figures.

Close to the rim, a foliage of Japanese takes root for a minute in “a glory of the West”; their smiles rustle among the private syllables.

“Fabrizio, vieni quà, subito!”

Two shrivelled local old ladies have come out for the cool air, the horses are so deep in their viscera they will be found only at the hour of the supreme recapitulation, neighing in stone.

What to do, oh flesh, with the stone’s reproof, “Be beautiful, you and you, behave with musical rigor, manifest even at lunch a palatine demeanor!”

What to do? My feet smell. But we are here, are we not, here, not over there, in the suburb, admiring the city dump.

And the water is clean, not even the kids throw peels and wrappers in it,

And maybe not simply because the little cop is there; who’s afraid of him anyway? his quarrel swallows him up, you could walk away with Mister Neptune.

This congregation I call a beginning, the beginning that has been beginning since the beginning,

You marvels, you immortal impossible water and marble demand.

From Chapter Two: Roaming Eros

FEVER

The man you choose to love
should disbelieve in rain
run mad on Mondays
tickle generals under the stubbled chin
and never die.

I myself am nearly come to this,
because you threw me, absent-mindedly,
one entire courteous word.

From Chapter Three: Names, and One Nameless

DO NOT PLACE YOUR TRUST IN BABIES

Do not place your trust in babies:
Himmler was one.
Remember he too took his first steps
on funny pudgy legs,
you should have seen him gurgle
and smile at the smiles he saw.
Ah what a happy family.

Next time you bend over a cradle
tuck a hatchet in your thoughts.

From Chapter Four: Poems With Animals

WHEN DOES WHY END?

When does why end?
Never.

Why is this?
Because of so.

Why is so?
Because of thus.

Why is thus?
Because of that.

Boundless mouse,
Unending cat.

From Chapter Five: Tenebrae

AFTER RUNNING FIVE MINUTES

After running five minutes
I lie on the grass and listen to my heart.

Sometimes I feel like calling down
The well of my body
“Organs, organs! Do you hear me? Discipline!”

Lord, to be dependent on a pancreas!

If it turns off I’m dead.
Do I choose to die? Not much!
Yet this fat machinery dares run me.

Salivating with indignation
I demand to be pure spirit,
I want to boss these lungs, these kidneys, this tripe.

Did you, Plato, yes or no call them slaves?
Then why does that heart keep thumping
When I shout “At ease”?

From Chapter Six: Torpors and Diminutions

THE SWIMMER WITH THE LONG CIGAR

There was a man who jumped because he felt like it into the sea
off Florida (near Vero Beach) to swim he said to Tanezrouft.
They told him, those who knew, the place he named was far too far
and anyhow far in a continent far from the shore
and never had a drop of water dropped on Tanezrouft,
but “is that so?” said he and jumped into the sea,
guitar slung round his back and puffing at an eight inch long cigar.
Reporters say they saw him last doing the crawl
between Bou Djebeha and Abelbodh, chipper as a trout
for all the sand, “having furthermore acquired
the native patter and a rose-lipped slave to cool him with her fan.”

Well! I too can swim! Teach me the rest, dear man.

From Chapter Seven: The Poet

NEITHER GUIBELLINE NOR GUELF

My pen you see roves little in the world,
my syllables are monks. For I perceive
that rhyming warm or cold won't hang a rascal
by the feet nor at the crisis shackle
any barking general. Mine the grief
that trails the earthworm to the hungry bird;
mine the minute dominion of the self:
dominion neither Guibelline nor Guelf.