The shaven rinds of lemon
                we squeeze and stir
                                into our espresso,

Quickly done, on the deck of the ship;
an enchanting afternoon.
The Ionian Sea all around us.

House, coffeehouses, neighborhood: setting
that I see and where I walk; year after year.

Here let me stop. Let me too look at Nature for a while.
The morning sea and cloudless sky
a brilliant blue, the yellow shore: all

Damon the artisan (none as fine as
he in the Peloponnese) is
fashioning the Retinue of Dionysus

When the taps ran blood
         she set her books on fire—
then she was in a white place

What comes more easily now
than writing to the dead?

He found old age awaiting him 
                on a spare and limpid plain
         between Troy’s embers and the mines’

1    It’s been raining six days now,
      stinks of worms. Every grocery-store
      weather mat in the whole city has been

While I wait I copy the smallest details,
how experts supposed a violent end, this corpse
an ill-fated soldier. A musketball to the leg. Another