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IN THE LUPANAR AT POMPEII There are tracks which belong to wheels Long since turned to air and time. Those are the powerful chariots I follow down cobblestones, Not being dragged, exactly, But not of my own will, either, Going past the flower sellers' And the cindery produce market And the rich man's home, and the house Of the man who kept a dog Set in mosaic. As tourist, but mostly as lecher, I seek out the dwelling of women Who all expect me, still, because They expect anybody who comes. I am ready to pay, and I do, And then go in among them Where on the dark walls of their home They hold their eternal postures, Doing badly drawn, exacting, Too-willing, wide-eyed things With dry-eyed art. I sit down in one of the rooms Where it happened again and again. I could be in prison, or dead, Cast down for my sins in a cell Still filled with a terrible motion Like the heaving and sighing of earth To be free of the heat it restrains. I feel in my heart how the heart Of the mountain broke, and the women Fled onto the damp of the walls And shaped their embraces To include whoever would come here After the stone-cutting chariots. Drowning With Others 8 3 I think of the marvel of lust Which can always, at any moment, Become more than it believed, And almost always is less: I think of its possible passing Beyond, into tender awareness, Into helplessness, weeping, and death: It must be like the first Soft floating of ash, When, in the world's frankest hands, Someone lay with his body shaken Free of the self: that amazement— For we who must try to explain Ourselves in the house of this flesh Never can tell the quick heat Of our own from another's breathing, Nor yet from the floating of feathers That form in our lungs when the mountain Settles like odd, warm snow against Our willing limbs. We never can really tell Whether nature condemns us or loves us As we lie here dying of breath And the painted, unchanging women, Believing the desperate dead Where they stripped to the skin of the soul And whispered to us, as to Their panting, observing selves: "Passion. Before we die Let us hope for no longer But truly know it." 84 ...

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