Pound and Brodsky in Venice

I don’t even dig Pound. But in a sunk cemetery in a sinking city

poets stick together. Brodsky is buried two feet away and for him

I leave an MTA card and a wild daisy, mutter about the metaphors

of transit, tell him how last night, with my feet dangling off the shoreline,

I watched a boat bob an emerald wave. I’m less afraid. Less of a coward

than I was a year ago. Now, I am a checklist of risk. When I speak,

the words will not stop falling and this is what I ask before

every decision or task: Am I mechanism of gratification or need?

Am I more than what I feed? Indeed, are we not all an only child

with no sibling to blame? At Ezra’s flat grave, covered in leaves,

I snap up a single shell curled on the slab. There have been no visitors

for a long while so I spray for bugs and the poisoned mist carries

over the dead. It is improper and a little funny and I say to myself,

“Stop spraying shit all over the poets.” Even this fascist one.

The truth is I’d clear any grave. I want to redeem. To save.

That’s my thing. My uselessness. A grim reaper too late. A retired priest.

Above, gulls chat and the cattle stars graze the sky. And at my eyeline,

insects stumble downwards, graceless, like unpardoned angels.