a broken microphone in one hand, dripping sheets in the other.

He takes yesterday’s tabloids for his score.

From under the keystone under which you’ve frozen,

you watch the capuchin grin and wave his cleaver

at the Rameses of the Salvation Army,

who’s raising his microphone and not in benediction.

They lurch towards each other from opposite corners.

Walk on, tell no one what you’ve seen, you mutter,

but a crowd’s gathering already to cheer them on.

You find your voice, you find you’re the referee

by popular demand. They meet at the trench.

You’re yelling for calm but who’s listening?

Printer

Francesco Griffo, inventor of italics

Follow his shaking, roasted hand: he sets chisel against wooden edge,

points burin at plate, strikes lead against wedge, lays kern against grain,

and so through the night rams out the ringing cavalcade of words.

The ink rains down in neat lines, an orchard’s planted on the sheet:

psalms, verses, prayers grow; he prunes them all with wayward grace.

The page burns bright, the typesetter’s eyes grow rimmed with red

from staring at tight, infinitely small and mocking margins.

His reined lust explodes in hot metal, then fine brocade:

most mornings, he ends up drunk in a canal,

bruised from a brawl. One day he will swing

from a hangman’s rope, singing to the last:

Yes, in three languages Yes, I announce, I declare, I proclaim it:

I was manic enough last night to smash through all the typefaces,

to drug every font, and now in my own sharply cut sans-serif,

I’ve slugged this by dimming candlelight for today’s edition,

this crazed compositor’s invocation

to a dawn that will break over Venice without his help:

Where I’m going, there’s blazing horror and no gentle restoration,

pitch the only ink, flame the only imprint

and icy darkness my Lord High Censor.

Find harbours, all you galleys that sail out

of my mind’s bedevilled press!

Glass

As a river traps the shadows of fish

the mirror trawls its freight of daily acts

that hover midstream, then quiver, flash,

plunge into sun-mottled depths:

bodies erased from a surface still rippling

with the phosphor currents of their fins.

The mirror holds the combing of hair,

a loosened strap, a blouse that fell

from a shoulder at noon, a puckered mouth.

Faces that have faded, hands that have dulled:

hasped in the inch-depth of glass, they answer your questions

with the fossil poise of fish bones laid out in a dry course.

Freshet-charged at summer’s end, you dive and sift through what remains

after the doing’s done and, clasping your proof,

break the river’s glass. You wave it arm-high in the rain:

the hieroglyphs twitch, spark, blur in a sound that, Fatalità!, was falling

before you were born, before the sun had opened its third eye