of mane—but like a maenad,
whose fury shakes to very roots,
like faeries, fates, the thumping chest,
fear, future, abandoned creature of its own
posture: like snakes.
Hot Wind
A type of desert pine, Chaparral
is also the street where I was born,
which has on it, sure enough, three Chaparral
pines. This is in Scottsdale, so called
because the largest ranch in these here parts,
in the parlance of the locals, belonged to one
Winifred Scott, of whom there are no
fewer than four bronze statues in the town
that bears his name. His major accomplishment
was owning the land later developers rendered town.
Of the “dale,” none can account.
“Scottsbluff” would be no more removed
from geological reality. “Scottsmount”
might even have worked, since, unlike a dale,
there is a mountain here. It’s called Camelback
because it looks like a camel’s back. Beside it, another little
hill that the natives, early settlers, and hundred years
of Arizonans called “Squaw Peak” was renamed
when Puritans decided a squaw was no longer an honorable
thing to be, for the first American woman
dead in Iraqi combat, when it was decided that Iraqi
combatants, or woman soldiers were more
honorable than squaws.
The camel has a rock formation on its nose
that looks like a monk praying to the camel’s forehead.
He may be praying for the woman dead in Iraqi combat.
Or all the dead squaws. Or Winifred Scott.
He may be praying for the chaparral pines,
which are the only living things in this poem so far.
Or he may be a pile of rocks on a camel’s nose. Or
a mountain’s face. For the whole personified
world in its heat and bronze shame.
A Medieval Roman Theology, Abridged
We killed
this Jesus,
and shook
him, and these
keys fell out.
View From the Ponte Vecchio
for JK
Look at those
statues effaced—
all that rain:
water erasing
the masonry—
time, fame.
Sprezzatura
Do not, like a purse-dog,
like a show pony, bare
your infirm affection for
everyone in the colosseum
to see. Better for them
to guess at your secret
desires, your lusts
and ambition, better
for them to detect in
your stride some adroit
manner, in your eye
some devious shine, and think:
I should be careful
around this one.
They should.
Better for you to know,
and be thinking, there is
a tangle of passages
and thruways intricate
as arteries teeming under
the gladiatorial contest.
A Lie, their Hands
at the Bocca Della Verita
Here’s the spot they stitched
the coin of his face back into
itself; you can trace
with your finger the rough
splice running over his eye
where someone tried to make
it look as though the circle hadn’t
broken, that truth was still spoken
from the mouth thereof
and people hadn’t lined up to tell a lie,
their hands shoved down his throat.
It says something about our senses
of restoration, no? And something else
about the past. What, exactly?
Ask.
Mnemesis
My students rib
me all the time:
you know who you look
