When I enter the cemetery
of San Felice a Ema
I have to go past many tombstones

People talk and talk more
about black holes.

Concerning the universe, the city of God,
we know very little.

Penicillin was discovered in a moldy petri dish
in 1928 and by the forties was called a miracle drug
and by the fifties had become both widely available
and cheap, which is to say that penicillin arrived
in time for me, who without it would have died
a child on more than one occasion, but didn’t
and grew to see the things around me die instead.

September’s lovely in New York, the sky 
Returned to baby blue, the breeze now mild 
As breath, and if you’ve anything at all 

Bottom line, it doesn't have one;
or if it does, it's for the souvenir value,
a knickknack marketed under ghastly light

No one knew her real name, but she appeared to be Greek.
She posed nude for painters, when she could find them.
She could slap hard enough to draw blood.

Nothing of the son occurred, of course,
not the evil dreams, not the dementia,
neither bovine diet nor bestial appearance,

There are worlds, unwieldy, dreadful,
Difficult to grasp, just pick one up
And it grasps you, its grip of iron;

They arrived and were so beautiful, it was sad
They refused to snatch you, too, the aliens.
Teenage warriors resplendent in their fatigues.

They cut off hands and composed cantatas;
They gutted their neighbors like fish and released
The shape of spirits from bonds of ebony;

Like I get this phone call from Shirley MacLaine,
it's the middle of the night, right,
she's all confused about time,

so you sat down to mourn
what became a corpse of light

Your little crush on the grotesque did not admit of cure;

The maples' glory is their own release,
A martyrdom tricked out to tempt a saint;

And then his name was their name (Forethought,
Premonition, how the word had frightened them!),

What compensation shall we say
Confronts a fractured energumen, awaits the devotee of day?

The sidewalks are wobbling in the god-awful heat.
        Ninety-eight in the shade,
Where there is shade, as New York lies locked under
        Layers of high pressure

Everybody has a point of view,
         a public expression when
                all is said and done,

And so we set out calmly into the sky,
Out over sheer space and distant waters

A sound like the sound of the sky on fire, like Armageddon

It seems someone else was interested in order, too—
The squat trees edging away down the slope
In wavy lines like rivulets—but wasn’t very good at it.

I stood by the river where the flesh of our world
Is swept it knows not where (but I knew)
And thought how one day the bottom land