Pound and Brodsky in Venice
I don’t even dig Pound. But in a sunk cemetery in a sinking city
poets stick together. Brodsky is buried two feet away and for him
I leave an MTA card and a wild daisy, mutter about the metaphors
of transit, tell him how last night, with my feet dangling off the shoreline,
I watched a boat bob an emerald wave. I’m less afraid. Less of a coward
than I was a year ago. Now, I am a checklist of risk. When I speak,
the words will not stop falling and this is what I ask before
every decision or task: Am I mechanism of gratification or need?
Am I more than what I feed? Indeed, are we not all an only child
with no sibling to blame? At Ezra’s flat grave, covered in leaves,
I snap up a single shell curled on the slab. There have been no visitors
for a long while so I spray for bugs and the poisoned mist carries
over the dead. It is improper and a little funny and I say to myself,
“Stop spraying shit all over the poets.” Even this fascist one.
The truth is I’d clear any grave. I want to redeem. To save.
That’s my thing. My uselessness. A grim reaper too late. A retired priest.
Above, gulls chat and the cattle stars graze the sky. And at my eyeline,
insects stumble downwards, graceless, like unpardoned angels.
