1.

Where were you when they handed out teeth?
I struck out in a season of baseball
Toward the legend of apples; I filled
The air with the china's whimpering. Duty
Romanced me though the inches of paper baskets
In the Sunday of charmed ceilings. Why won't you
Be kind? Because I am not here for this session.
I am dancing around a joy-filled coroner. The
Ablative case hates me. The hedges are freezing.
You would look nice in a wastebasket.

I came toward my darling last October
with cams and deceiving optional bracelets
Of sleepy light! She received as in bins
My nervous air of smiling as within her hand
Winter's begun! No, for that bitch in violets
Is britches in voices. Animals
Fill the fear, whose benign April will patch
The sea! Far better than ivory clothes!

2.

Now it is Sunday and the leap year is over;
The Polish light is descending a mountain of lawyers
Named cattle, the march is saved
From last Juno ontology. Can the basin reciprocate
African harmony's sleepy films? Negative
Poseidon! O chows. They choose to eat sleepy plates
Of grand opera, times digressing natives,
In clockwork shoes, a medicine to shovel them violets
In the way good counsel cerebrates the scalding shore.

3.

He is the comic fantastic
Tents. The bandleaders notice him
Through the saving brine. A dash of fishes
Summers him. He eats chemicals. They
Dash his bronco into the
Sea of soul confusion. The marginalia
Of his lungs!

What social force upon this easy doorstep
Can or may weather his hatless blimp?
I know you notice that these airy things
Are dogs.

Who heeds the flying violence
Of his pate, and the medicine
Of jam-filled violets, the traffic lights
Of lips?

It doesn't seem as though we could die up here, does it?
The Acropolis is so old that death on it seems superfluous.
So we can afford to take some chances—
Leap off the wall! Bash statues with our heads!

God smiles down at the Acropolis. It's a good church
But with the wrong idea. Then he is distracted by his children
Scattered among the chambers of the sea.

Old friends, I am thinking of you still.
You built the Acropolis but you didn't build it for me.

The Acropolis has a uniform
That no schoolboy can wear because it is invisible.
"It goes to the Periclean School!"

When I first came to Greece
I was twenty-five years old
And I've learned so little since
That the Greeks already knew!
Almost nothing!
I don't know why this is—
Mathematics, astronomy
All have remained dim to me—
I should have applied myself!
My "life" got in the way
But what was in my life
Inimical to Greece?

Those who put me off by their irony
Are unlike the Acropolis.
Or at least unlike the way it seems.
If the whole Acropolis were ironic,
I mean an ironic comment
It would be a huge joke
Enjoyable frightening and laughable-at without end!

Go to look at it at sunset when it's PINK
My guidebook said. Good advice about anything, I suppose.
Or, after some road has been mended, when it smells like tar.
"When you are in love, go hear your beating heart."

Aeschylus and Socrates
Used to sit and chat up here
On the old rocks beneath the light of the very old sun
And one of their frequent subjects was
How young or old they felt or were.
"I am getting on, Socrates," says Aeschylus.
"Oh no," cries Socrates, "you still look like a boy!"

Plato would walk up here when he was tired
And talk to the alas-dead Socrates—
"Master I have come to a wall
And with statues and columns beyond it. What should I do?"
"Keep walking," the dead one counsels,
"And walking and walking, until the end.
You know it, know what to do—you are my best pupil."

What a car would do on the Acropolis
I can't imagine. But a deer or a beaver could
Build a home here while the light turned red
And sank into the Aegean.

The "wave of the future"
Never waved over the Acropolis.
It was never in any sense prophetic
Or meant to be prophetic
Of what was to come.
As long as the original lasted
The present was the only time.

Acropolis, Acropole, Acroplolexis,
Acro—high, outermost, ultimate, never taken, undivulged,
Single-hearted, far, furious, added to Polis, city
High-up city, but what a curious city you are
With more god-objects per second than people in the street!

Greek people who are used to it
Say, "Oh, up there!"
On the great wall
A thousand miles of moonlight
Wrote Li Ho.
The Acropolis you can see all at once—
The Parthenon its nose
The Erechtheum its mouth
The Propylaea (entrance stairs) its teeth.

You can't find a glass of water
On the Acropolis or in Notre Dame
Or on the Great Wall of China. No use trying! There just isn't one there!

There are also no comic books on the Acropolis.
Though there are some on the subject of the Acropolis.
I buy a few down below, on the city's streets,
HELLAS KOMIKS and E PARTONIKI.

The tyrant Pisistratus used it for a fortress
To boss the life-loving Athenians until five hundred twenty-seven B.C.
At which time there was only one temple up here, the Hecatompedon.
About face! Present
Arms! You're under arrest! You have nothing but Persian papers, no good