She doesn’t think so much about the boats
Drifting back at sunset from the fields
Of fish—rubber boots and sunnyslickers
Against the spray and mist of the expiring day.
The water antipellucid, murky and cold,
The revenue of the nets now aboard.

i.
So it is, the chaos
contracted

in an unfolding scene
in five sentences:

Body. History. Evil. God. Human.   

ii.
But what ideas,
in what facts? Inside the sun

the heat is sucking
the soil’s moisture,

Driving out to Long Island over the Williamsburg Bridge
I spot the young white men on the rooftop.
There’s a bottleneck as the ribbons of feeder lanes
Merge, and the boys on the roof laugh, one of them
Cradles a mock rifle, another cocks his thumb and forefinger
Into a pistol—the way of cowboys and Indians, the way of kids,

Dear you know who you are:

You must be so relieved
to have, at last, the weight

of my affection off you.

for John Milton

Their theaters cackle and bray, their carriages
clutter the streets: cockades, torches, liveries
clash. Philistine hearts
jocund and sublime, they smear their deals

gold on columns and cornices. Temples fume
with burning fat. The choicest girls
parade with kohl-ringed eyes and spangled thighs.
Let the poor creep into shadows: they offend.

after Suetonius

Caligula ordered the night city illuminated.
Every stoop, porch, or balcony was a stage.

He made the senators dress as prostitutes—
tight silk skirts, paste-on eyelashes.
Up to a matron to wriggle into a boy’s shorts.

Marcus Severus, one-armed veteran
of our labyrinthine border wars,
had to hobble into the amphitheater
armed with a plume and attack a lion.

A plume! We were fascinated.
We were all players, who was the audience?

No one ever leaves
the building across the street
and I can’t explain why
I spent the summer
staring at its blank windows
and stony facade, its caged trees,
while the sun crawled
across the light-blue emptiness
yawning with clouds.

are not comfortable beside mine. On the bus,
pulled forward by gentle inertia,
a hundred of us sway, or sigh, is that it,
what we do in the moment, in that air
that is too cool. Listen,
I want to say to you, dear heart,
imperfect flesh, blue eyes,
abused elbow and plaintive knees—
listen, I want to breathe in
the world that is falling apart.
I am too old to learn
your name in any language
other than this one. I am

She prefers
my phone &

using my
computer
w out the burden
of her life
last night
I described
it open
a circle
she kisses
my knee
its life
that is
my name
they thought
she had
a lot
I think
it’s enough
I mean
it’s astonishing
if I had (his)
I could
feel everything
but as it is
I know
what it is
I love your
lips.

There is no room for them horizontally,
vertically, or in a jar: glass or ceramic—