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?
I tried, and each attempt was a fiasco.
I yearned, but every love of mine was wrong.
I needed, and the shame was overwhelming.
The Museum of Modern Art isn’t hungry
Each wall is perfection
Leger says hello to Picasso
Today I wished without mercy
in the bloodless nations of the mind
that a city had gone down with you
He gave me a spruce lap desk
for writing in bed that Christmas.
It was rubbed into fragrance with oil of almond
A platter of walnuts, I think.
Shanghai and the banquet is festive.
Strong Chinese brandy and “Campi!”
With a great scuffle,
the meeting adjourned.
Calm turned to storm.
She sweated, sweated and swore.
She predicted a total eclipse
as if it were replenishing shade.
Loving that man was a way of hating God:
useless, and no sense of privacy.
The fates fell, like cats tumbling
Reading? Morning.
Reading morning and a sky like the olive.
Reading the morning in sandals sifting through soot.
Love, we who ply forked tongues to speak
Note what critique
Kelp, cork, and shell