At the Museum of Empress Livia’s Garden Room

In a future we believe in, these plants
will all be ghosts. In the Rome
that likes to be a mirror, you can see
the way a single shrub, once
quick-set to seal the emerald shade
to a spiky evergreen shape
on the thousand-year-old fresco,
is all smudge and distant cousin now
to its own far forward arboreal bogey.