homage to Auden
I came to see the Dome
and the curved embrace of stone
that gathers in the faithful
to St. Peter and his tomb; to see
the catacombs where martyrs lie,
and the Sistine where
Michelangelo made
God in our image—
instead I heard a crowd shout, not men, not women
but sheets of loud color urging lion and tiger
to rend believers with fang and claw,
or chariots to run them under hoof and wheel
and scythe those left standing on either side.
A quarter million roared as those who still stood or
crawled were hacked or shot or hauled away and gassed
while vultures merged into a single shadow
above the blood and stiffening gore.
I came to see the Forum’s ruins
once brilliant in the sun,
to walk where the sacred fire burned
and kings bowed to free men
whose words gave life or death:
to see where Caesar burned
and Antony fired the crowd
to grief— all safely passed—
instead a lonely Asian tourist asked me by
anonymous ruins, “Where is Caesar buried?”
I sent him to the Forum, and left a
laurel bough in the grit and gloom of a basement
built where once he twitched his robe over his wounds.
Tourists lowed before the nearby Pantheon
where Italy’s exiled kings lie in place of Jove and Mars,
or Venus who might have brought love’s fist
to this flash-filled, loveless space.
I stood before St. Theresa
to see her body convulse
in God’s embrace:
to see Christ in supple stone
grace his mother’s lap,
and St. Peter’s chains aglow
as though he was never crucified,
head down—
instead a mass filled the street in every era’s dress:
I rubbed my eyes certain I was asleep,
but they remained when I dropped my hands
and gathered me in. Under a sky burning to coal I
groaned as they groaned,
begged as they begged
for water to ease my thirst, but no help came
in all the time it took the buildings to fall into ruin
under a sky raining hot ash.
I came to see fountains spray,
the four rivers stream
in Piazza Navona, Saldi’s
rising figures in the Trevi, the
Triton blowing his conch near
Via Veneto: to see lovers
take pictures to recall they
stood there, young, joyous—
instead I saw the generations fill the Tiber,
my own face rise and sink among the others
with dull or astonished or hopeless eyes,
and all those I love and all they will love and those too
in that river of flesh flowing past Castel Sant’ Angelo
towards the sea where all roads end
and all times meet, where striving follows striving,
thirst thirst, dream dream
we never waken from, or slake, or gain.
Rome, 2009