We rushed our run with the mules of Pamplona
to catch the return of the swans of Capistrano,
a bit mangey from the flight. Sad what acid rain
had done to the answering machine tapestries

of Turin but the Garden of Hanging CEOs
of Babylon restored us. It was there I once
asked you to marry me, or someone like you
who wasn’t specifically driving me crazy

while the blouse-makers of Kansas City
sang their bawdy idles, not to be brought low
by mad eggplant disease. Never would mere danger
tape keeps us from the prosthesis mines

of Flanders where milipedes discharge
hydrogen cyanide when squeezed. I thought
when a man is in the presence of doubts,
Mysteries, uncertainties, where’s nothing

better than the dried-out fountains of Retrograde
where your spit foretells the hour of your doom.
But I was wrong and lost you in the valium fields
or Tibet or was it in the House of Mozart’s

aneurysm? Maybe you remember my pledge
on the tilt-a-world of Vatican City
or the pledge of someone like me when
our hair was cut straight across our foreheads.

But I don’t care, I’m not coming, I’ve had
enough. So lay me, my darling, in a field
without history or name that I may sleep
until the quack of dawn.