Here is a holly.
Now I am gone.
Fell dead through the unity
of dead history.

I shared with
an obsolete and moribund Aeneas
Silvius, Pius II, his black damask-
curtained litter, drawn

when thronging crusade-deserters passed

to keep his heart afloat
down that mortal aqueduct
to empty Ancona.

When you, nascent renaissance

poet-pope rowed me
back across a turgid Danube,
you spared me no
now I am gone.