Classic Poem

Like stone unconsecrated, I lost
feeling. Clearly, every year
wills us dead. But at the end
of the transept I saw him dancing
as if he didn't have to, and felt
better. Then, like madness,
a coldness interwove again
its sad conjecture until from a
stained-glass tree a body
hung as if it wanted to, fingers
spilling birds and birds, and from
the head fauns and phalloi.
At his feet stiff milkweed sprayed
seeds across the water and behind,
toward the lights, a fish-line snaked out,
and behind that scrolls of nets
from trawlers drifting off.
This is the kind of thing you'd expect
from Etruscan tombs, where death
is life. At Veii, for example, where
I coupled alongside the rock-cut
water courses, the ritual bathing-places
in the woods, beside the tombs,
among the glitterings and purlings,
the jigging scraps of light scattering
like insects, coming back together,
like art contracting and expanding,
pulling together memories of the invented past.











From Poetry Magazine, Vol. 186, no. 5, September 2005. Used with permission.