She wraps her young Roman in her empty breasts,
sweating like clay in her husband's salted hands,
and the baby sleeps, and they somehow sleep, in spite of their warm bodies.

A sudden, heavy turn, like a lover violently flipped,
the tanks erupt over plaster and flesh-everything rumbles and it's too hot-
a forced separation, a great funeral pyre, an act of self-love, cremation.

The ash fell for days, they say, thick on Pompeii, like a gentle snow,
and you can dig through it with a hammer, there-rock is real-
or excavate it fresh from sidewalk grills, here-a memory.

Some we may choose to preserve-
with some we've no words in the matter-
petrified.

They sleep, dreams stiff with carbon-dioxide, no more living fearing death,
the little one never knowing fearing life, and theirs is the last embrace
one man knows, reading Time at his desk in the tall morning light.

Near Vesuvius a professor's built his life on bones, precious death.
Not so far from us young firemen stare at palms not tender enough
to find a body holding on-day one, rebuilding on the presence only of ash.

Day two, and so on... They open the window. They close the window.
They cover the vent. They open the window, and breathe deep bronchial phlegm-
fiber-glass, asbestos-they cannot sleep.

The digging continues, always the voices, the cutting, the digging. Then, one day
they decide four months is the length of hope, pretending that you aren't already
cremated, aren't already buried-that you've too been waiting all this time to rest in peace.

A recent graduate of Stanford University's poetry-writing program, Peter is now working as an actor in the Washington-DC area, where he is currently shooting a horror film called "The Milkman." Peter will begin a four-year acting program at The Juilliard School in August, 2002. His poems have appeared in G.W. Review, The Hollins Critic, Kimera, The Mind's Eye, Paperplates, Rattapallax, Red Booth Review, Spank Thru, Undressed, Writer's Journal, and Stirring, for which Peter has also served as a Guest Poetry Editor.

Have comments you'd like to send the author? Please e-mail PETER CASSIDY at: peter@cassidydouglas.com  or fill out the form below: