Sister Satan declares, Elegy is liquid no it is air.

Sister Satan declares, When poetry reinvents itself without words, I will be first in line to listen.

Declares that when sex reinvents itself without the flesh, I will be first in line to make love.

Asks SS, And were I to lower myself by taking up the pen, what then?

(For one must lower the hand to lift the pen.)

SS declares, In the lost hours of night, the truth of my thoughts comes alive, only to be extinguished before day arrives.

So an ocean of chemical waste has spread across my desk.

What to make of its beauty?

Sister Satan declares, The forged elegies are home to me. We drop them from helicopters into the sea.

Declares, I have hidden a rose upon my person or within,

and within the rose a homespun mourning cloak,

and within that cloak, no body that you know.

Sister declares, I have not spoken of my village, my underworld, the comedians and cosmologists who gathered there,

ecstatic and vacant-eyed,

to toss now worthless coins into the River of the Fathers

if that was its name

on the eighth day of each week of the thirteenth month of the year.

I loved then the names of the trees: the holly, the copper beach, pin oak and holm oak, ailanthus, chestnut, slippery elm and winged elm, red maple, choke cherry, paper birch, red alder, dogwood, stone pine, Scots pine, mountain pine . . .

Though in truth, Sister Satan admits, I can name none of them with certainty when I see them.

And in truth, Sister Sadie declares, the words I am using here to speak of myself I might just as well use to speak of a tree

or of a physicist undressing time by means of light, a solemn infidel like myself,

ambling along the banks of the filthy Tiber, under a swerving cloud of starlings at dusk.

There more than once have I sung the Four Last Songs to an audience of none.

Have sung or been sung.

And if as well I celebrate too much the Devil’s Trill, as some would claim, it is what rings in my aging ear,

hands, throat and tongue no longer my own.

Sister Satan further declares, That semen stain left somehow upon me lingers like the scent of hashish in a steamy room, whose space at once expands and contracts, like elegy annihilating the past,

that stain shaped like the Angel of History’s isolate tear,

while kind Sasha in Petersburg slips the eye of an almond into his mouth, and sweet Elena serves us wild garlic from the mountains and passes me a forbidden cigarette with a wink,

and with any luck we confound the agents of grief.

(Rome– St.Petersburg– Rome, Nov. 2015)