(13 B.C.)

We
are led into
a courtyard off Via di Campo
Marzio #48, past a man in a little shop

who
is fixing shoes,
down to the basement and across a
sort of catwalk to a shaky ladder, at the foot of which we

see,
through a meter
of standing water, the bronze letters
set in travertine say ΕΤΗΕΙΑΙ ΠΑΥΟΝΤΑΙ, that is

“The
Etesian winds
stop,” as they do on the Aegean
at the end of summer, when the sun is in Virgo. It was a

dream
of emperors, 
teaching even the sun at last to
walk orderly between monuments and anniversaries which

are
the expression
of a self both invisible and
immortal, one identical with the world of natural law,

now
beyond the griefs
of cracked and linear time, ablaze
in the incised tangle of the analemma, being rather

part
of time itself,
untouchable, having transcended
dynastic art, a shadow walking between the Mausoleum

of
Augustus and
the Are Pacis, on whose threshold
there stood, on the Emperor’s birthday, this solar affirmation

that
the past, given
the pattern of the divine, had been
made present; that the future, being certain, was also present

Deep
beneath modern
pavements, the pinched grace of these lines still
remembers the moment the wind’s breath died on the water’s face; the

shade,
the touch of it,
cast by a human head lost in thought,
to whom it occurred that the one way to godhead was through absence.