Roving,
watching – high-quality Placidus, greetings!
Does
the smog lay softly down?
Brass
and copper spout water?
I imagine
your dry-visaged musings,
your
pace through groves and markets,
sandals
ringing and clomping worn marble.
Scandals
in the Roman supermarkets—
that blatant
president, and crooked congress—
but do
they still make Coca-Cola suckers there?
Here,
everyone sends half-undressed envy,
including
Insufferus, our near-beer of poetry.
He
wants to collect you and bring you back himself,
like a
trophy poet, to be mounted and stuffed –
or is
it the other way around?
Oh, to
fly to the wall of that love’s appointment,
to be
at least a loud fly, at last.
Here, too,
air fills with language I don’t understand –
am I the
one in a foreign land?
Will
we let the same sex wed,
is
there ricin in the mail?
I move
through clouds of words,
the
American news storm,
marriages
of adverb, verb,
adjectives
bent over before their nouns,
a
possibility of poison in every molecule I meet.
Here,
they should be making movies
of how
you and I will save the world –
the
highways already hum the overture –
but it’s
a movie goes unmade.
Here,
the only ocean, a space between us,
heaves
at the vast thought of its dominion,
sobs in
its unseen depths.
An uneven
ocean – that is how one
wants
to be remembered,
as a great
unforgiver, an unbalanced weight.
And
yet, whenever you go abroad another poet dies:
the
authorities are suspicious. First Du-again,
this
time, even worse, Boss Cupid himself
went
out all night long and for sure
the
amped-up party air burst his heart.
Come
back, Placidus, before we all die!
I can’t
imagine you much longer without you being here—
Now that’s no poet.