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?
There’s good fear, fear can be
good when you’re keeping a family
of Jews in the closet or under
Instead of flowers and annuals in livid snow a forest
of nameplates: Ammobium alatum
(everlasting), Myosotis (forget-me-not),
When I’m writing a poem,
there’s less and less of it.
As I approach the mountains,
It’s very dangerous to know
too many words.
Each of them has its
flip side, which
also has its flip side
and so on ad infinitum.
I take the books left for free recycling mainly for their smell,
I stick my nose among the pages, into business not my own,
then stroll around someone else’s home,
peeping into their kitchen and their bedroom. But once
their smell has faded and the book’s imbued with mine,
Sadomasochistic rain in Leipzig. It slaps the sidewalks.
It sticks its fingers down their drains. It relieves itself
in the city center, then washes away the evidence, so that
They take out all the parts marked X. You watch this in a mirror above the operating table. You never knew you had so many parts marked X.
Once, along the empty streets of your voice,
I saw a ruby-throated hummer
Defy the air, and sunlight smoke with choice
Into my heart a sure desire enters
that the slanderer can't ever destroy, nor the fingernail
of the slanderer, so long as against his evil speech I arm
You talk about the Soo Locks
and how you love to watch the water
go up and down, and the boats,