On the pool hall wall

still a hair-oil stain from

the young guy with acrobat hips

whom the poet loved and whose

whoring bothered him as little

as Pompey’s pillar.

Jealousy was five minutes of brown, sluggish rain

outside the bead curtain, an Alexandrian

outbreak of apathy in slack wind

over Lake Mareotis.

Whose crocodile, a mummy now

– main attraction of the Gr.-Rom. Museum –

stretches on its wooden bed,

scales blighted to acid dust:

not real, but lasting.

(Translated by Rosemarie Waldrop)