CIRCUMVESUVIANA John Domini ". . . the essential tourist link between Naples and points south . . . " Look what the overheads dragged in. The wires firecracker when contact skips, the wagons worm and shriek as if they whelped a prodigy at each degree of bend. These trains deserve the gunk that garlands folding doors, the relics of our day (a saint's revered white knucklebone won't last as long as Styrofoam). Once you're inside, the plexiglass, commuter-hashed, can blur Pompeii like stuttered peristaltic blasts and fresh assaults of ocher lava — I mean, you see them singe the windows, these kids, against the rules against the cigarette. Worse yet, the glimpse of Paestum farther south, the roughage scarring Mother Hera, the grinding underfoot so drear, we might be bulls at sacrifice, in full cry after, fuddled, wreathed, parading glazey to the blade.
	The altar swills around our hooves, there's flecks of membrane, pelt, of daisies and camellias slashed in two. The priestess quotes some lines above our tufted ears, our spattered, shocked-flat ears, some gospel rule we'll never get; below, meanwhile, unknowable tectonics queen it — they've been waiting while we roamed and grazed.