I've seen too much: rabble and beauty,
astonishing horses, dazzling fish.
Everywhere, the heaving sides of life,
with touches of sweat, and oil and sea.
And paintings one needs a candle to find
in
churches smaller than
books.
Each picture is like a cracked maze,
or a blackened map. Ugly at first.
Then one notices a single hand, or an eye,
a glimpse of one's beloved
in
a crowd.
The memory of Rome is like an old
dilapidated monastery, badly placed
on piddling flats that smell of sewage
and senile empire. Here, the sea
lets the land breathe toward Palermo.
The lungs of a frigate fill -
like a saint's - all will, the body flayed
and gone. That's how the ancients seem to me,
sceptic, emboldened, fleshless -
Between Cape Minerva and Capri,
the boat disappears - if I were to watch
a person I loved sail away like that,
I wouldn't survive it.
The harbor waves are frisky in the wind.
Like the noble horses, yesterday,
threading dirty streets -
my heart went out to them -
a line ofstraggling gold,
varicose vein of ore in dull hills.
This is a world where psalms make sense,
though the earth is changeable as weather.
Don't think ofcertain dangers,
especially one ofwhich I needn't speak.
I enclose the envelope of your last letter,
scorched
in
one comer.
