In the Piazza of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva

Now I begin
Semper incipiens,
To sit and drink my wine
Beneath this obelisk, the son of pride.
Nor mind nor will incline
To know how I to my own self have lied.

As brown leaves fret
And classicisms clash,
My cigarette
Fragments, then drops its ash.
Sparks strike the marble, bared
Bone-like; a crown for dead Minerva’s shrine,
Minerva, now prepared
For supersession in the soul’s design;

Illumination
Doomed. But then, the rain
Showing salvation
In their hard depths again;
Came as appointed, making
Dark mirrors in a sea of cobblestones,
Grey sky’s baptismal breaking
Which for mankind’s long treason now atones.

Between, I stood;
A man, both deathless, dying;
Far from green wood
And snow, mid marble, denying
Thrice with a mortal’s breath,
And thrice repenting, taught by grace’s strife.
Both breathing in my death,
And then exhaling, with the smoke, my life.

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