the walls remember

I've been saving this one for a long time.

I made my bed between Sappho and Catullus
watching the moon set, the sparrows fly up at dawn,
a poem burn itself out at the bottom of a yahrzeit glass.
A couple at Vulci dreamed out the underworld
on a lid of nenfro, carved to their marriage-sheets.
At Pompeii, crushed in the hollows of boiling ash.
In a thousand years, not even the walls remember
who loved, who fucked, for how much, so long ago,
not even the coins I dropped to pay for your memory,
a candle into the last of the wine.

—Sonya Taaffe, "Graffiti," in the September 2011 issue of Stone Telling.