An Inscription

I do not intend the people I know to believe me
outside themselves: belief is inside the self.
"It is the not-me in my friend delights me,"
Emerson wrote. It is my friend in me
that lets me see my friend.—These are convictions
one sleep this side of poetry. But in time,
with sleep dissolving from me like a mist,
Ifind the shape of a scimitar still in my hand
and know what holy wars I should have gone to
in the right season. When I say to my friends:
"We are that invisible war," they smile
with a smile I know from myself. It is so we learn,
one from another, our difference is no war
but the delicate jointure of the parts of a skull.
But is the articulation of bones a meeting?
I have slept on ruined Rome and wakened green
with the squeal of birds and the power-hum of the bees
sealed in the air like amber. In the atrium,
a laborer was eating bread and cheese
in the noonday of his wine. I watched his ease.
It was longer than the ruin. "Buon appetito!"
I cried like God in the Sunday of my pleasure.
He raised his wine flask and called back "Salute!"
Then did he turn to stone? Or the stones to him?
Something stayed fixed in time out of that meeting:
a signal from my friend in me, a placement
of holy banquets in their atrium,
a vision of the bones that speak themselves.