Whether he should penetrate distant Indes
where the shore is pounded upon by rough surf
without ceasing once until morning, friends who’d
            follow Catullus
 
whether it’s the Caspian sea he reaches,
whether soft Arabian sands, or whether
those reclining stretches of land the Nile floods
            over and over,
 
whether he should scale the most lofty Alps, and
gaze on the great monument Caesar won, the
Gallic Rhine, that horrible water, or risk
            barbarous Britain,
 
willing if you’d be to attempt all this, then
might you, maybe working together, and if
all goes smoothly, take to my girl these words, my
            last correspondence:
 
Let her live, and fare well with all her lovers
all three hundred wrapped in her arms together
not one of them truthfully loved, but one and all
            fucked up forever.

Let her not look back, once again, to see my
love, by her faults, now and forever cut down
like the flower that, nicked by a plough, fell, in the
            fields of my childhood…