there’s this motel by a snake-nest

there’s this motel by a snake-nest
in mounds of earth, where nothing grows,
and the snakes creep in, influencing your dreaming,
there was a suitcase under the window; it had murder in it;
I dreamt this in my deepest sleep for ages, in Sicily,

/he’s just this really

/and wheeled the carnival ships
along the main street of Megara
like the ancient Athenian flower festival,
the city Dionysia, opening bottles
of ancient memory of death/ and maiden sacrifice
(the mistaken murder of the peasant in Attika
who’d brought down Dionysos’ secret of viniculture;
the other peasants, they thought it was poison, & killed him,
& his daughter found him in a fountain, & hanged herself;)
the men of Megara in carnival drag, mock-shagging,
on tractors dragging ruins of trees/
opening up the seasons/
and praising what survived the winter,
including infants,

the girl who walked around Megara in a daze, smiling
with cigarettes/ and something cold someone’d bought her:
she got pregnant at this point, when she gave birth later
her head was shaved, smiling to herself, defiant,

/there’s this valley nestled in London’s thickness
of boaters sleeping, and onto the canal
where the wharfs of the city glistened
with seagull movement/ their voices

/going fishing early with my father
in the parks of Hampton Court Palace, the longwater
with its reedy banks, far-shore bushes, giant ancient
artwork/ I imagined connected to the Thames,
I held the back ropes, when we cruised up to Oxford
the great dusk-shadow
carving the Thames Valley at Runnymede
like a glacier/