(First Cause of the Hubbub)

You can say courage but mean fear, and where

you place your secret kiss depend on chance,

on someone else’s interpretations

of the books decreed in Rome in 382

to be the Gospel Truth.

The typical state is permanent war:

(Mr Skill)

All the cities of antiquity were walled

and minute observation saves us.

Galileo, plotting the trajectories

of four nomadic specks near Jupiter,

procured proof of a nature indisputable

That Not Everything Revolves Around You,

and this was the first disconnect between

the eye and fist, a new truth that soon

eclipsed the other facts that left you foxed

and slightly teary: funfair mirrors,

the central locking, a magnetic catch

on your mother’s shiny leather purse.

(Christian’s Deplorable Condition)

Say, 90% cement and 10% meat

when I moved to Rome at thirty

fairly hopeful, fairly certain I might

begin some sort of self-taught course in

Appreciating Beauty, on how not to view

it solely with incipient suspicion,

a Covenanter’s eye to waste – in any case

I entered the belly of the beast:

city under occupation where each

(Land of Vainglory)

same-but-different priest would watch –

the pappy white hands clasped over the crotch –

as the checkout girl packed up his stuff:

Prosecco, zucchini, carta igienica –

and each time I wanted to obstruct,

like a friendly but finally menacing drunk,

and stand too close and interrupt and recount

at length how Tycho Brahe made himself

a metal nose, tipped with gold, and kept

beneath his table Jepp, the dwarf he thought

clairvoyant, and let his pet elk get so plastered

over dinner it stumbled down the stairs

and died. I was thinking this:

that the history of history is ridiculous,

that these specifics were sufficient.

(Plain Called Ease)

You can reach down or up but you can’t touch:

you live in the abstractions and this is

electricity. It flows on like a viscid

white river and this is how you contemplate

the density of stars, a breadcrumb on your sleeve

whose weight exceeds the Empire State –

and if what extends its living presence

from the Mariana Trench to out beyond

the last star’s light, you have no name for,

or none for yet, even now you note

the continuity of things, how they mix

and bleed and how much trust there is implicit

in your fingertips, how history is hearsay,

shu-shu, bavardage, which you tend anyway

to read as a mirror or sexual trope:

(Mr Brisk)

A stranger arrives at night in the city

with something extraordinary under his cloak,

a leather pole that makes the most

distant bodies close. One could put one’s eye

to the contraption, spy on washerwomen

spreading their apparel on the reeds to dry,

a button of horn on the torn shirt

of a steeplejack climbing the doge’s palace.

He had to act fast and thought it out that night:

the shopping list, extant, reads: sheet glass,

an organ pipe, slippers for the boy, chickpeas,

artillery balls of variant size.