with the earth
in it.

When the tourists land, the great
seminaries of Rome assign me the allowance
of worry.

And if my life were to close, I would close
with my implacable wrist.

Rome tells me to learn, but sometimes
I can hear the fitful whistling
drip in my eye around us and also within
us.

Love is nothing without lineage. Home is where
children are born, and it changes the earth.
How do you love, Earth?

Rome means the world is a poem, and between you and me,
the world flows in my temples
with the heart of time. It is eternal but then
it stops and the rain drips in.

God fills time with social things
like rain and the war and the land he captures
when he needs a new series. War is both sides
of a world.

Earth, you are too large
to be an image: you make
me hold
who isn’t there.

I search for Rome in the water, I search for God
in the clay. But I can read the stars walking
in the language of my movement.