Classic Poem

My hands
Had new lines.
A man cannot have hands thirty years
And not have lines.
I looked at the lines
And said “You are a man now, Ernest.”
The long bony fingers rubbed against each other
Like an old cat against my legs.

Armies came to Rome and Venice
Leaving ruins and new monuments,
And the people parading on feast days
Heard a cracked Egyptian obelisk mutter
To an armless, legless, one-breasted marble goddess from Greece:
“You are a city now, Rome.
“You are a city now, Venice.”