Poem 433

An ancient Roman holiday town in the Bay of Naples that subsided 5-10 metres under the water when the deep ‘magma chamber’ under it drained … it’s still there full of villas mosaics statues and scuba divers … the thing about these magma chambers is that they refill and so eventually that process will push the town back up above the waterline for the next however many hundreds of years before the following historical/geological cycle causes it to take a dive once more … it got me thinking that we go to all this trouble of digging up Pompeii but it’s only inevitably going to be buried again … we in the shaky isles also understand impermanence, what it is to live in the shadow of future upheaval … but it’s also a metaphor for the substrate and vicissitudes of any human life … bears some similarities to Poem 22 …

( … I like the rhyme on sponge/come sunken/Roman crawls/free/sea/these/sprawling … and the image of the chipped-away remains of the volcanic pyroclastic flow as a black jelly … )

Pozzuoli

Italian city lengthening 
like a fingernail
a wave about to break
                                               I too
have lived my life on the sponge
of the fire to come

as the sunken Roman town
crawls free of the sea
and these sprawling 
                                         folds of time
electricity blossoms 
under our streets
wet crackling wings split outward
from tangled larvae
of cables

in Herculaneum 
                                  the ancient skeleton
of a mother half set in black jelly
the beast still crammed in her door
waits to be covered
in another surge