Here is the world, right beside me,
a little garden with a swing,
some dirt and a red shovel,

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?

When I finally took power in the Nomenclature, simply by outlasting my rivals, never arriving early or too late at the meetings, repertoire of sage nods, my mind had distanced itself from the world. I no longer knew to whom I was talking, or the topic, though I was certain of myself. Hunger and desire lasted, savage as in boyhood. It was the names that flew away, leaving a maze of empty nests.

I am a child acting Romeo.
I love Juliet desperately
but I cannot say it.

You can’t get attached to the moments, she said. They fly away. 

Each twilight we came to another mean village
a little deeper in the forest—
a toothless woman scraping a bloody sheepskin;

The great Evening has fallen and the world has grown tired
like a blinkered dray horse knock-kneed in its harness.
The trees are little green puffs and the flies slower and dimmer—

District of tenements, squat brick laundries,
warehouses with shoulders like boxers’,
and one shop that sells ancient maps,

The house burst into flame. That’s a cliché, I thought, burst into flame. For I had been reading day and night. Perhaps I left the stove on after cooking an omelet. Or let the lint cake inside the dryer. Such was the fascination of the book, though scholars who study it all their lives, lives that pass in a breath, claim it has no answers. I held my copy close to my chest, 

Before they stripped me
they dressed me like a doll
in the sanbenito, a burlap sack