Town

What is this place, this province of truth and sin,
Of hustle and bustle under Helios?
A Leviathan, or the craftsman’s art?
A city in miniature contained entire within
The locus of a dissevered skull? What dark chaos

Could such sleepy eyelids conjure in dreams,
What terrible Hades? Who is dreaming,
As the scenery is rumbled into place,
And who waking, with things just as they seem,
To the quiet speech of a nameless face?

Some place else, these localised feuds
Could not exist, nor such beliefs:
Without Venice, where can be the romance?
Without Venus, what beauty in the nudes
Of marble, for centuries here, a sculptor’s circumstance?

How the ideas crowd around! How rude
That none should have the manners to wait,
Each making of himself a world entire,
A universe, thinking to intrude
Upon our least concerned, most private state.

Ours is a pushing, shoving kind of world,
Even given similar ends.
To hear your voice would, I’m sure, improve
Present purlieus as, the years unfurled
Like a map before me, steadily you hove

Into view, welcome, so near again at my side,
Obstructing my route, upsetting my plans,
Leaving me flummoxed, as you once did, now,
With little to gain, and little more to confide,
But what a canting age and niggardly time allows.


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