Hepatitis Poem by Robert Dawson

Hepatitis

Flat on my back, a foot-square paperback
of The New Golden Bough propped
on ballooning liver, I study 'the riddance of evil' …
how Romans heave-ho bad glass and Frascati bottles

from windows on New Year's Eve to discard witches.
It's New Year's Eve, I'm yellowing in Rome;
my bed-broken kidneys chip against my spine;
my heart pumps Styrofoam.

A midwinter rain rinses the Palatine
and capitol into the Forum's trench …
that china shelf of shattered Wedgwood ware.
This Roman souse unglues the hand of God

in Clement's apse. St. Clement hefts his oar,
a strip of marble chits. The faithful are
suggested by the stags that lap the drench.
Rome's fallen into the hands of men.

Now the defenestration begins
with somebody's bidet crashing the cobblestones …
the witch's external soul in crockery.
Even in borrowed sheets my breath is white.

I'm fading with the year. My orange Etruscan urn,
made in Trastevere, rattles its dumb lips
begging to break. At twelve I vomit bile
while all the burnt-out bulbs of Rome explode.