Cardboard, Marble, Glitter

Mostly glittered green and blue,
though with small shocks
of gold and crimson, too –
a little decorated Christmas cardboard
peacock sits across from you,
its jointed legs unnaturally
sticking outward from
its blessedly insentient knees

upon a stolen chunk of stained
and veiny marble that you took
from some dark sinister back crevice
of an ancient Roman bath
carved in the rocky shoreline
of Sperlonga – halfway to Napoli
from Roma: oh, the longest years
and shortest breaths

have passed since you were
in that vast Italian cove
in the Tyrrhenian Sea –
emperor Tiberius’ deliciously illicit
pleasure garden of a place –
its ghosts still howling from
the brutally incessant gratifying
of his sadomasochistic tastes:

now, sitting on a fragment
of its face, is this ridiculous
adornment; cardboard, marble,
glitter in a powerfully inane embrace:
imagination will go very far
to soothe itself – yours, Tiberius’
and this delirious indifferent peacock.
Infinitely runnable, this race.

.