For My Roma

The city slumbers without sleeping.The Tiber, little more than a quiet stream,drifts from stone bank to stone bank,deep down in its chasm,like some progenitor of a torrent to come,some advance messenger of a high king.Splashes of cool water on warm bodies,Roman fountains, Trevi, give form andmeasured order, the liquid past movingto the present down granite and marbletongues; only the children fail to starebut leap forward to embrace-living projections of the marbleachievements. Foamy water, in myriadstreams and pools and arcs tumbles,is happy-froths, rests, goes backagain to slip, slide-green andbubbly-framed by old Triton and Aphrodite.Roman Forum at the center of Rome's center,the center of my center, the beginningof the beginning, the start of our start,resting, cogent, imperious, in Romancapital letters, august, stark, haunting,public, grand-like the gong, the ring,the bell sound without instrument.History rang-timorous sound, a big bang,fading echo, still present, hear it,lilting, reaching, stretching up.There are weeds among the columnsand I think of disorder and order,death and life.The Roman triumphal arch at midnight is milky.Through the alchemy of the dark, it isnew again, freshly inscribed, awaiting thelegions to pass beneath, like some lost andaching lover so eager to touch and passbetween her legs-or a birth, perhaps, fromthe time womb, the passing out to life of thevaliant, the victors, the acclaimed.Et tu, Coliseum-round and round you go,like an accelerating stone vortexstorming through the centuries.I walk in you and pick up a piece of you.Like a curious surgeon, I examine, and feel,consider and reassemble. You don't tremble.I race around you and run through you, upand down your stairs. Speak! What are youdoing here? Stolid, implacable, stabilized,rooted down into the Roman stony soil,awaiting another century. "I wait for noone," you breathe; "I live as the moonand stars, beyond your questions. I belong to what I am, never limited to past,present, or future. My marble reality, likeJupiter's heart, can only be guessed at."