Chad Davidson
LEAVING POUND'S GRAVE
And luck, or death, would have you
dazed in four languages,
whose calm reciting of closing hours
turns grotesque.
And you never found me.
The world tired of killing me. Slowly,
with a botched fuse, the few bridges
from my Idaho will out: girders torn down,
spite and calligraphy swept off pages
blank as subway pacing.
And you say you'll never read the Cantos.
Anticipating your lover, her penultimate
night in Italy, the fleshy nausea
of benzine from vaporetti,
the Amarone wine, Valpolicella
you taste, necessary as blood,
and the copy of Eco's latest in her purse:
if you can't say before losing her
to study me, perhaps be damned,
then fall Patty Guggenheim.
And distant Venice;
glimmering city of God.
So down to ship, the soothing weight of her head
in your arm, each stop, each pier inviting
more Venetians until the ancient craft
seems sinking. Consumed in sun, Coducci's walls-
a rage for normality-suddenly rising…
You should be as dumbed,
lifting this dead lid of earth.
Dumbed
as the instant the Luftwaffe lowered on London,
with such precision.
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