Summertime, the cities empty. Saturdays, holidays
drive people out of town. The evenings weigh
you down. Troops could be marched in at even pace.
And only when you call a girlfriend on the phone,
who's not yet headed South and is still at home,
do you prick up your ears—laughter, an international drone—

and softly lay the phone down: the city and the regime
are fallen, the stoplights more and more often gleam.
with the red. Picking up a newspaper, you read it from
where “Doing the Town" spills its microscopic type.
Ibsen is leaden. A. P. Chekhov is trite.
Better go for a stroll, to work up an appetite.

The sun always sets behind the TV tower. The West
is right there—where ladies are frequently in distress,
where gents fire six-shooters and say "Get lost!"
when they’re asked for money. "There Man Oh Man"
climbs from a silver clarinet fluttering in black hands.
The bar is a window opened onto those lands.

A pyramid of full bottles has a New York chic:
that sight alone will give you a kick.
What reveals it’s the Orient, though, is the bleak, oblique
cuneiform of your thoughts, a blind alley each—
and the banknotes either with Mohammed or with his mountain peak
and a hissing into your ear of a passionate "Do you speak. . .”

And when, after, you weave homeward, it's the pincer device,
a new Cannae where, voiding his great insides
in the bathroom, at 4 a.m., with his eyes
goggling out at you from the oval mirror
above the washbasin, and gripping his very near
sword, "Cha-cha-cha-" utters the conqueror.