Thirsty all through Lent, thirsty on feast days too,
I was meant to be part of the picture,
Born to be the thief with his face averted,

Only a stone’s throw from the crowd,
An exiled white gleam of flesh in the background
Before the bare  hill blurs into pines,

And the pines into…? So it is written.
After the crowds went off to their amusements
And the three of us were left to wither away,

I kept meaning to ask, then forgetting to -
Staring off, and gliding out of my flesh on my stare -
Forgetting what and who it was I had wanted to ask.

I remember now a gust of wind on the dry hill
In that moment, and the sore screech of a wheel,
An endless screeching, off in the distance somewhere,

And the wind carving an idle shape in the dust.
In that moment when you pause after a long day
Of scheming and calculation, the moment just before

The wine is poured at your table, the afternoon light
Quivering a little on the bleached fronds of the palms
Above the Piazza dei Poppolo, the moment when Craxi

Emerges dripping with sweat from the Senate, think
Of me, so necessary for the balance of the composition,
So necessary to the street that goes on being a street,

That never once rises up into the fine spun dust of heaven,
As you watch it quickening with life and will watch it …
How many more times? Twenty? Fifty? Think of me,

For who among you now could say with certainty
Which thief I was, could tell which mark blurred
By rain in a ledger once meant me, which meant

That linen on a stick who was once my friend,
And which meant the possessed boy who went on speaking
To shapes he saw before him in the air, shapes

Which I knew, even as I turned my face away from him
Then, out of a serene contempt, were nothing more,
Could never be anything more, than what was really there -

The hard, pure, furiously indifferent faces of thieves.