Aeneas scopulum interea conscendit, et omnem
Prospectum late pelago petit...
Navem in conspectu nullam, tres litore cervas
Prospicit errantes....

Aeneas, meanwhile, climbs a crag to seek a full view of the vast sea. No ship in sight, but he espies three stags wandering on the shore.

        Like dirty bindings unwound from old wounds
        obscenities and blasphemies flap the breeze
        in Manhattan, capital of street mumblers.
        Insane soliloquies, mad monologues
        affront the ears of those who only think
        they understand:  it is Speaking in Tongues,
        whose adepts are possessed of gods or demons.

        In translation the words turn out to be
        majestic odes to long-broken Grecian urns,
        or stately elegies for loves long-laid
        in churchyards or other arms -- it is the same --
        or laments for vanished morning-gloried trails
        and lofty shadowed rooms bedecked with fire,
        or keenings for the lost fresh early world
        where Aeneas saw the stags along the shore.

        My Gael gift of prophecy is on me:
        To you Valhalla-haunted fat Brunhilde
        sleeping it off in a Village doorway,
        and to you, oh scion of black princes
        betrayed to Nightmare Town by swarthy dreams
        and lolling now on moonscape subway stairs,
        I whisper you sweet notices of revenge:
        Fishes one day will swim where now your heads
        and waters will drown your ghosted murmurings.

        Summer, 1958