after Suetonius
Caligula ordered the night city illuminated.
Every stoop, porch, or balcony was a stage.
He made the senators dress as prostitutes—
tight silk skirts, paste-on eyelashes.
Up to a matron to wriggle into a boy’s shorts.
Marcus Severus, one-armed veteran
of our labyrinthine border wars,
had to hobble into the amphitheater
armed with a plume and attack a lion.
A plume! We were fascinated.
We were all players, who was the audience?
It is a loose sleeve whose hair wraps the
Bedouin on his pony and then slings him
Into the wind, always to be a monad
Everything turns into tape. It (check one)
puts the multiples on a loop (1)
reduces all numbers to one (2)
Now the trees tempt
the young girl below them
In 1954, in June
I saw a total eclipse of the sun by the moon.
I saw the flowers fold up, the birds
If the generation wither
twinkling slinky, our of which
how should I
17 floors
above 8th Avenue
in an apartment in 1962
lumbering logging lonesome
lugging muggy weather
numbs my brain
Tonight the
light is
right
I speak of one whose triumph
is like his own despair
“a prison we all carry”;
Up-and-down shafts of light brick
Lift occupants up into prisms or roofs
Of green copper, and then embark on the sky.