I'll revise my epic screed
On civilization's inhumanity
While overlooking these cypress trees,
Powersip espresso standing up!
Even the birds here can explain my plea
With impeccable joie de vivre,
Though it doesn't matter quite as much
When the fields are this perfect.
The towns have let in influence
In the few hours the shutters are open
But still they conclude at each sun rise like
Ancient villages always have
That people are interesting
And so one must pay attention
To what they need.
There are fountains of bloodthirsty nymphs,
For instance, statues where they're raped,
Temples where Dracos are worshipped,
And religions concocted from stolen scrolls
In crypts underground, the true halls of truth
Not this legal fiction Vatican city,
Boundary set by Mussolini,
Not really any boundary at all
For everyone here must still gain permission from the Church
To speak
Under the domes of steeple city,
The wolf town,
With its palimpsest of conquest
(They call them souvenirs).
The unearthed ancient ruins spring
From irrigation ditches.
Pyramid di Chestio is built into the wall
Where the laser show, Il prisma Pink Floyd
Presents homage to things celestial.
Everyone loves a story,
And it's always the same, though protagonists change,
The one when in Rome, say,
Where a whore shape-shifted to a she-wolf
Before her Venus half-shell re-baked birth as virgin,
And Caesar went from God to someone betrayed
By his 12 bird disciples,
And the vials of blue tears from Afghan lapis lazuli glass
Went from Roman funerals to chapel vestibules
Just like that, as the age snapped like tree-branch fingers,
And Rafael who snuck in Nero's summer
Er, temple, to learn the mysteries of Roman painting
Turned Plato into Da Vinci
In a mural on Hellenic glory for the cardinal's personal chambers,
And Peter turned himself into the pope
After walking a bit on the water and hanging upside-down
On a foreigner's cross.
"Most religions fail in the first 30 days,"
God said to Homer Simpson,
God said to Homer Simpson,
Referencing restaurants, something every Italian at least
Would understand,
But the ones that hang their cross out successfully
Must recapture death itself from immortal zealots,
And no one did death better than the Romans,
Its hive army masters of every cruel way to kill,
Who made sure that every victim stayed dead.
So the pontoon shift was made, from running water to holy spirit,
Marcus Aurelius replaced with Apostle Paul.
It's commemorated on top of one of the, what,
13 Egyptian obelisks?
The Romans knew had transcendental mystical power
But not a clue, they say, what it was.
Such impeccable story engineering! No one even knows
Who the Flavians are!
Yes eternal renovation does have its sloppy edges:
The Vestal Virgin statues do have their heads lopped off;
They sent poor Michelangelo back decades later
To paint on spec a revised last judgment
Befitting a chastened, counter-regurgitated Church;
Not every chancel door matches the temple columns;
Only 26 emperors were killed by their wives;
The few unpillaged bronzes were too mixed a bed
Of intellectuals and minor generals to lucid dream an imperium;
Still there remained a whiff of what they thought that they'd erased
If not the Gnostics, Druids, Essenes, at least the Estruscans!
The sun still rises on pagan days and rebranded holytides
Though year zero is no longer the birth of Rome
But its son.
Ah, but in the good times all things appear as one,
Even tyrants are benevolent,
All taken liberties forgotten ...
Not so in Fortuna's more unfortunate eras,
When the heart remembers everything,
The loss of daily baths,
The Funeraria that became the GI donut canteen,
And grieves even the rock left of a dome
As a kind-of monument to a somehow-not-forgotten suffering:
The flight of hard-earned faith to Avignon,
When Saracen, Hun and Visigoth marauders
Peeled Rome's gold and marble surface away,
Stripped every roadside mausoleum on the Appian Way,
Where the toll-booth pope did highway business.
The enterprise always continued, under an ever-confusing syndicate
As when that criminal Garibaldi
Laced up the land-fatted fiefdoms for old times;
Or, the neo-realist interregnum
Where what was replaced what they wanted it to be
For a minute,
Before the money guest arrived like sirocco breath,
Or, when they found themselves locked in their homes at last
And had to learn to live with less, they found they liked it!
The guilt-free pleasures of a life as pure as the water
That gave this place a purpose.
But it was the cats who discovered
Where Caesar was murdered, in the basement
Of a minor patrician friend,
And now the "Julius Seagulls" have landed
Where the cats have fled, the top of Tarpeian Rock,
For there are more dogs than children in Rome
And more restaurants than dogs,
Yet the ancient graves are adorned
With dolphins,
As if for posterity to know
How the miracles of hydraulics were performed
For tourists whose hotel toilets clog, who pay
Through the voyeur nose to be jerked
Through every potholed stone
None of them the smooth as glass
Strada one, whose slabs were sliced to perfect size
And lugged by sandaled slaves with logs
Through a still-undiscovered system of ropes and hoists
In unattainable time over obscene distances
To roll the troops to every ravagable port
For the borrowed Gods
The popes obsessed over in their private rooms,
More tycoons than hierophants, they say,
As if the joker St. Peter won their all-in poker game.
They were so good at making things disappear
They vanished themselves.
In our plain site excavations
We tell our own stories,
Dig our own graves on sanguine soil,
Of corporeal impieties
And inconsequential excess —
It's what the ruins now tell us, which is not
Of the silence
Hadrian worked so hard to obtain,
The sound of fountains everywhere
His vast ear ranged,
When he took his meals
On his peristyle island library
Alone, with obsidian mirrors,
Seeking to be able to live at long last
Like a human being
While invisible subterranean slaves
Kept his privacy inside a room with one painting,
This Emperor Maximus, with maritime theater,
Seven philosophers' cupola and enough undressed
Gay sculptures to feed an army,
Tho the pedestals are broken now like candy cigarettes
In a villa-state that is now silence total.
I can imagine the hushing of horses
As the vandal hordes broke through,
How they took their orders still
To silence tongues with death,
Keeping quiet as they gamboled around,
Saying nothing to stir the waters of the dead.
