Lost City
Cities may become lost for a variety of reasons.
                                            -Wikipedia
And as it turns out there are a hundred ways a city 
can go missing more or less
immediately.  

But for sheer, prestidigitative annihilation  
(now you see it, now you don't?)
nothing can rival

Iram, City of a Thousand Pillars, which fell into
a sinkhole and disappeared 
after the cavern 

it bestrode collapsed.  God was to blame, they said.  How else to
explain a vanishing so
final and so swift?

We know now that it was infrastructure, that decaying
vault the city engineers
should have inspected

and evidently didn't.  This happened one hundred years
post-Christ.  From outer space now
the camel-train roads

are visible still, the old frankincense routes converging 
from the corners of the earth 
around the pillared 

terraces of fairest Iram.  A traveller nearing it
by one of these roads might well
have seen the city

go down into the desert, posts flying, and thought nothing
of it.  Only when he came
to the small pucker

in the sand, so like a navel, would he have understood
the birth that had transpired
where he stood, or seen

in his mind's eye, momentarily, the convulsions still
transpiring beneath his feet
or, if time allowed,

imagined that he heard (because there would have been no sound)
the muffled cries of the doomed 
in their narrow space.

He would not have lingered long.  This was the Empty Quarter,
emptier still, now Iram
had disappeared.  Soon

the sun would go down, though it was yet high above his head,
the moon would rise, though he thought 
it was at its ebb,

and he would find his way south by starry guide to the sea— 
and then, home—if stars there were 
in this unmade place.




​
No Salt 
 
                       
Leave out the salt, it isn't good for you
the doctor says, and in no time you'll find
doing without is something you get used to

like contact lenses, and if you want to lose two
or three pounds, instantly, from your behind
just lose the salt.  It isn't good for you.  

Forget the salads, forget the anchovies too
the crackers, cheese, the olives of all kinds.
Doing without such nibbles you'll get used to.

In fact, abandon eating.  Who can accuse you
of gluttony when you've left all food behind?
(And salt, of course, which isn't good for you.)

Besides, you shouldn't have to sing the blues to
a diet.  It should concentrate the mind
(as well as you) and, doing without, you'll learn to

forget the mouth, with its vicissitudes too
numerous to mention.  Relax, unwind.
But no salt, hear?  It isn't good for you,
and doing without (believe me!) you'll get used to.