Classic Poem

The world alters every day & cities fall & kingdoms are transferred
for as Petrarch observed we change language habits laws customs manners but not vices & not diseases & not the symptoms of folly & madness
They are still the same but of great scenes why speak?
Three summer days I lingered reflecting & even composing (dichtete) by the Pine-chasms of Vaucluse
& in that clear Lakelet moistened my bread
I have sat under the Palm-trees of Tadmor smoked a pipe among the ruins of Babylon
The great Wall of China I have seen & can testify that it is of grey brick & coped & covered with granite
& shows only second-rate masonry

—Great Events, also, have I not witnessed? Kings sweated down (ausgemergelt) into Berlin-&-Milan Customhouse-Officers
The World well won & the World well lost
Oftener than once a hundred-thousand individuals shot (by each other) in one day
All kindreds & peoples & nations dashed together & shifted & shoveled into heaps that they might ferment there & in time unite
The birthpangs of Democracy wherewith convulsed Europe was groaning in cries that reached Heaven could not escape me

Have held converse with the Ultimate Romantic Adolf Hitler in Berlin crazy as a bedbug
at the end of his Luger & gasoline & single testicle
the end of one tradition & the beginning of another
up in smoke
O phoenix Führer
Chaplin & Cleopatra Giraudoux & Lorca
& the riddle of the body remains unsolved (Police Gazette says he's in Argentina, but who isn't?)
& have seen little Vietnamese kids line up of a morning to squat on a stone fence outside the An Dong Market in Cholon next to the Five Oceans Hotel
shitting yellow

O God
(ach Gott)

But last romantics are a dime a dozen
Once or twice I buzzed down the wrong side of a rotten road to Sligo
to wet my loafers in the weeds of Drumcliff Churchyard & check to see that Yeats was in the same old place
He was: a mean gravel-covered grave, & that epitaph he specified
I Volkswagenmensch was no horseman but a paid-up member of the Automobile Association
& Hitler & Yeats chat in the mind—
& is this your first trip to Germany? Zo. What do you think of it?
Does the sun shine this way in Ireland? I beg your pardon, England? I beg your pardon, Constantinople? Istanbul? Forgive me, forgive me, I mean Byzantium, of course, Byzantium.
Spooks? Ah . . . no, I can't say that I ever see spooks. I don't even smoke.
I can see them now neat as nuns swapping jests Or Hitler & Eliot—
& is this your first trip to Germany? I see, I see: then you're . . . quite zo. Does the sun shine like this in London? I beg your pardon, Mississippi? Forgive me, I mean Missouri, of course, Missouri. Poetry? No, no . . . I never have the time. Actually, I don't even eat meat.
& Pound & the Duce have been recorded already (topic: Brazil nuts)
Hell I think I'm the last romantic
& last platonist & thomist & stoic & energist & harmonist & antinomian & cynic & epicurean & marxist & puritan & federalist & atheist & anarchist & analphabetist

but aaaaaaaaaaaa
please don't lay me away
in a dull yard mit weeds in