Fire licked the Rome of your smile, indivisible Petrogram – where RW touches Jerusalem and threads knot above Las Cruces. The nef rows, rows... palms, heartbeats, light.
[Nota: the long poem Forth of July is bookmarked by the homonyms rose/rows - Empson's emblematic antinomy in 7 Types of Ambiguity. But here it's more like a 7-sided pun, because the poem (out of Mandelstam's Voronezh) emerged from Rus (Kievan Russia), a word some think stemmed etymologically from the Russian for (Viking) "rowers". (A nef is an ornamental miniature ship.) Rus - and Rhode Island, that is. Double vision.]
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