At dusk the ambulance came
pulling all the way up onto the lawn
like a red speed boat drifting

With Pelléas and Mélisande, Claude
Debussy turned to sleeping figures:
the garden was growing cold, its trees

He was struck with awe at the sight of them:
a shoal lifting above the water's surface;
each head trained to his voice's timbre,

Even now I do not understand
the 5pat and hissed and murmured words
strangled out of throats in distant cells;

As a young man I was headstrong, willful, rash,
      Determined to amaze,
Grandly indifferent to comfort as to cash,

Fifty Hans Holbein heads
From the Queen's collection:
Wyatt and Surrey so real

A time comes of silence and secret Sargassos,
the desolation of tourists and billboards,
a time of seamless ennui:

My mind long gone, having forgot to shut the body
             off, I will lie in some spare room,
some former nursery, entranced by waiting for death

Who can't but love a soldier wearing mums
In his helmet? A colossal private
Produced a flask of something and toasted

Supine on a gurney below the Acropolis tacked
to the ceiling, my right leg slowly turning
cement, I'm an accidental artifact of Pompeii