When I enter the cemetery
of San Felice a Ema
I have to go past many tombstones
and must actually walk across the grave
of Enrico Nencioni
a distinguished writer of whom I know little.

People talk and talk more
about black holes.

Concerning the universe, the city of God,
we know very little.
It was cooked for a long time
over a low flame.

Penicillin was discovered in a moldy petri dish
in 1928 and by the forties was called a miracle drug
and by the fifties had become both widely available
and cheap, which is to say that penicillin arrived
in time for me, who without it would have died
a child on more than one occasion, but didn’t
and grew to see the things around me die instead.

September’s lovely in New York, the sky 
Returned to baby blue, the breeze now mild 
As breath, and if you’ve anything at all 

Bottom line, it doesn't have one;
or if it does, it's for the souvenir value,
a knickknack marketed under ghastly light

No one knew her real name, but she appeared to be Greek.
She posed nude for painters, when she could find them.
She could slap hard enough to draw blood.

Nothing of the son occurred, of course,
not the evil dreams, not the dementia,
neither bovine diet nor bestial appearance,

There are worlds, unwieldy, dreadful,
Difficult to grasp, just pick one up
And it grasps you, its grip of iron;

They cut off hands and composed cantatas;
They gutted their neighbors like fish and released
The shape of spirits from bonds of ebony;

Like I get this phone call from Shirley MacLaine,
it's the middle of the night, right,
she's all confused about time,

It didn’t want your sympathy and had no need
Of affection, the hot breath of your infatuate regard.
A building razed, a jungle come, river run to dust,

When they knew what he had given them,
This florid colossus with the sunrise in his eyes
And skin the color of perfectly ripened fruit,

The sidewalks are wobbling in the god-awful heat.
        Ninety-eight in the shade,
Where there is shade, as New York lies locked under
        Layers of high pressure

Everybody has a point of view,
         a public expression when
                all is said and done,

It makes one all right, though you hadn’t thought of it,
A sound like the sound of the sky on fire, like Armageddon,
Whistling and crackling, the explosions of sunlight booming

It seems someone else was interested in order, too—
The squat trees edging away down the slope
In wavy lines like rivulets—but wasn’t very good at it.

I stood by the river where the flesh of our world
Is swept it knows not where (but I knew)
And thought how one day the bottom land