Virgil on Main Street: Poem Presaging War

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Not man, though man I once was… Dante

This night is a burial cloth
for the waning deeds of men,
the smell of Hell tarnishing the air
as in Dante's dream the reek
of moldering souls stranded
between setting sun and waning moon.

I carry a bottle wrapped in a bag
and swear at traffic as if passing cars
carried men and women who might
understand, recognize this warning
and take it deep as a kiss
that blossoms to raging need,
to a stalwart fuck religious with wet
connotations, and act. A three-letter
word no longer kept warm and humming
in any dictionary, no longer the companion
of passion or even desperation, only of war.
The last enigma: the crumbling to dust
of everything with nary a hand of protest lifted.

Bone-white is an abstraction
until you see thousands of 700 year-old skulls
stacked neatly in a church on the deep
plains of Eastern Europe, plague-dead
and gaping, a choir of virulent silence sung
castrato for the one true king, vagabond
ruler of empty eye sockets and broken
teeth and occipital divisions like a map
to the invisible country, the crazy line
of a river to nowhere multiplied by 10,000.

The rough tenor of impending death
sounds in a truck's horn, the driver
annoyed by my gamboling, my poet's
ranker that is the stillbirth of the union
of optimism and the truth: fallen angels
are frightened by their mortality
and kill anything reeking of vigor.
At the least they pretend it never happened
the blithe dead all smiling from the pile,
the tenants passed under by new plagues
all angel-born, the mass graves, the skulls
on the altar, the chandeliers made of femurs
and lumbar vertebrae. I throw the bottle
in its brown skirt at the truck, the driver afraid
for his life and dreaming the end of mine.