The day you learn New York does not exist,
London will be erased, and Paris missed,
and everything you've known—the pottery,
the fruit, the windows and high-rises—will be
reduced to blackened flecks, and on that day
you'll find no breath can wheeze them all away.
There's nothing you can pack, no cab to call.
Walk out the door of yourself, love, leave it all.
I'm waiting every place you can't quite see.
Sweet corpse, Pompeii is not in Italy;
it's just below the surface of the lake
you've looked so long into to watch your fake;
it's in the looking glass and looking back,
it's in the thing you always have and lack;
beneath the cloak, beneath the mask, the face
of something nameless, a place without a place.
Come live under Vesuvius, my dear,
my life. The skeletons wish you were here
where ancient hammers still in mid-strike ring,
cold forges crackle and untouched irons sing,
and nothing moves, and nothing ever dies.
Young Icarus is plastered in these skies,
arched upward, far beyond the fatal heat,
and here's the famous labyrinth of Crete.
Here life is led inside its death. We live
shaped by our knowing it, a negative
where shadows show up white and light is dark,
where nothingness makes snow of every spark.
Come quickly. We'll, unmoving, walk the street
where lava seethes forever beneath our feet
and sweetest char and ash coat everything—
the stars and sky, peach-blossoms in the spring,
mountains and streams and fields, and you and me—
holding our shapes for all eternity
in vivid forms beyond the touch of age,
dark ink carving words from a blank page.
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