10 posts tagged “poetry”
Augusto Jandolo: On Excavating an Etruscan Tomb
By Tom Sleigh
"When we lit our torches
My eyes went blind in the cave's
Cool dark--
the damp rock rough against my palms,
I remember how we strained to lift
the great stone lid: slowly
It rose, stood on end ... then fell
Heavily aside, crashing down
in the smoky,
Turbulent light
So that just for an instant I saw--
It wasn't a skeleton I saw;
not bones,
But a body, the arms and legs stiffly outstretched--
A young warrior's flesh still dressed
In armor, with his helmet, spear, shield, and greaves
As though he'd just been laid in the grave:
For just that moment
Inside the sarcophagus I saw the dead live--
but then, beneath
The sea-change of our torches,
At the first touch of air, the warrior
Who'd lain there, his body inviolable
For centuries, dissolved--
dissolved, as we looked on,
Into dust ...
his helmet rolling right, his round shield sagging
Into the void beneath his breastplate, the greaves
Collapsing as his thighs gave way ...
But in the aura
Round our torches a golden powder
Rose up in the glow and seemed to hover."
"Twenty-First Century Exhibit"
At the Museum of Natural History,
three guards in blue eyed us while the fourth,
shorter than the others, traced our bodies
with a wand. Satisfied, they returned our keys,
coffee, eyeglasses, and marched us into the exhibit
crafted to look like an office purged of its desks,
its loping workers, the maze of gray-board cubicles.
In the center of the room, a water cooler
stood patiently. In vain, we tried to explicate
the intent: "A metaphor for the modern personality,"
said a man with cockroach eyebrows. "No,
it's the perfect marriage of form and content,"
uttered a woman in a beret. Just then, the artist,
who had been hiding among us, crossed the rope
and knelt at the cooler, his lips working the spigot
while the rest of us stared, tongues too dumb
to say anything as the water hiccuped and disappeared.
He gleefully pointed at his rounded belly,
and then waddled to a door without a doorknob
marked with the universal triangle for toilet.
His work begun, he signaled to an unseen hand
to soften the lamps above us to a kinder orange
so he could more easily study us, his creation,
so he could attempt to learn what can't be learned,
like why I hate tuna salad garnished with pickle,
how my father wore it on his sleeve—pink-green
like his heart—the day he busted my nose
for spitting and then again for crying about it.
How could anyone ever know this by looking?
Still, he persisted with the examination
and turned us over in his mind, prizing our flaws
because they conferred character,
even as his own body began to betray him,
the sharp pain in his groin growing sharper.
And if it had been one of us across the rope,
on the rack for art, how long would we have waited
to shout finito! or genius! once our bladders
had swelled like accordions and we were dancing
our own version of the dervish he was madly spinning?
Bored with ordinary agony, we slouched
toward the tribal wail, the old altar and rot displays
of the twentieth-century wing now under renovation.
-- Tomás Q. Morin
"The Conquerors"
They showed us the white flower of surrender
They showed us the red
They fell down before us at the gates of their city
Terrible to behold we hovered above them
Lords of the Air
We promised them the peace
That passeth all understanding
We promised them the freedom of the broken knee
Only the conquered can know
Rumors arose strange premonitions
A talking fish a white crow
& news of uprisings in the distant provinces
Trouble closer to home
Victims killing victims a priest cried
Who is blameless?
The Lords of the Air who dare not touch earth?
Those who kill without risking death?
Following the itinerary of stars
We returned to our city
There we found they had raised in our absence
At the center of the great walled marketplace
A statue to Phobos
God of Fear
As they fell down before us
Perhaps we can be forgiven for asking
Having lived so long among strangers
What is there to fear?
-- L.S. Asekoff
Confinement
by a dictator in a Western business suit.
Now that he looked like all the other leaders, observers
detected a certain relaxing of tensions. Something in the air
said the weather was changing,
and if you looked up at the sky and squinted, you could almost see
the faint dollar signs embossed upon the big, migrating clouds,
sucking up cash in one place, raining it down in another.
Meanwhile I was trying to get across town,
to my brother-in-law's funeral,
speeding through yellow lights, arriving late,
taking my place in a line of idling cars
outside the cemetery. Having to wait with everyone else
because no one had gotten the code number
to punch into the keypad on the automatic gate.
Cold day. The neighborhood, ugly and poor,
like a runny nose,
a reminder of misery in the world.
And Barney was dead, big PartyBoy Barney,
famous for his appetite and lack of self-control—
—now, needing an extra-large coffin,
as if he was taking his old friends
Drinking Eating and Smoking
into the hole with him.
—So what hovered over the proceedings that afternoon
was a mixture of grief and vindication—
like a complex sauce the pallbearers and aunts
were floating in, each one thinking,
"Oh God! I told him this would happen!"
Later, at the reception, I saw my beautiful ex-wife,
wearing a simple black dress
that showed off her beautiful neck
standing next to a guy I would like to call
her future second ex-husband.
A long time since she and I had been extinct,
but still I found inside myself an urge
to go over and tell her one more time
it wasn't my fault—
and struggled for a moment with that
ridiculous desire.
Upstairs, looking for a place to be alone,
I found a television, turned on and abandoned in a room,
churning out pictures and light against a wall—
Images of crowds, marching down streets, past
burning, overturned cars; people in robes,
gathered outside embassies and throwing stones.
Even with the sound off,
not even knowing the name of the country,
I thought that I could understand
what they were protesting about,
what had made them so angry:
They wanted to be let out of the TV set;
They had been trapped in there, and they wanted out.
--Tony Hoagland
"A Moment Ago"
We were out on the deck talking with mother,
watching the line of shadow climb the foothills,
intercepting the peaks around us one by one
as if the valley were a bowl being slowly filled
with darkness. She wore the blue cloth hat
with a flower, having just given up therapy.
We asked what she remembered of "little"
great-grandma and others we never knew.
It was hot. An afternoon storm had splotched
here and there the laurels, startling the swallows;
a dusty trickle had formed briefly in the throats
of the gutters. Mid-recollection, she paused.
When the day wears, she said, or when I begin to feel
too much for myself, I think of a song I heard
my mother sing I don't know how many times
over the sink washing dishes, a child's song,
and it lifts me. It was some minutes later
that the leaves of the poplar began suddenly to rattle,
exactly as the leaves here in the darkening yard
ten years and two thousand miles away just did,
a harsh, dry sound like seeds shaken in a pod.
It is a brittle world. Over and over dusk
wells up in us; birds fly uncertainly overhead.
-- Philip White
"Bureau of Missing Persons"
In the dead writer's last short story the characters
have no names. They speak without quotation
marks in a setting that looks less like a penthouse
than a storeroom for books and old scrolls.
Still, when they stride out to their terrace
and peer over the city, they swear this
is the ultimate high-rise, the true resolution
to a plot involving disappearances. Like
a bureau of missing persons, they gaze
down at holiday shoppers, taxicabs yellow
as sunset, and swear they'll find dog walkers
dreaming up haikus, day-trader night readers
of eBooks—all stalking the sidewalks. Each evening
the atmosphere deepens. The short story loses its way.
-- James Reiss
Silver set with opals around my left index finger, matching drops dangling from my earlobes. I adore opals, the mix of ever-changing colors on the surface and below, their milky glow. Given how I've been drawn into naps lately, I've taken to fancying them as foci of meditation and relaxation.
So many naps. And then awake too late into the evening, then alarms blare before the sun peers over the horizon and I stumble off to the commute. Maybe it's the remnants of my New Year's cold, now being beaten into submission by another round of antibiotics. Maybe it's something else. More often than not, I've found myself on the sofa, or my bed, with heavy eyes and no willpower to drag myself back into the land of the aware.
Boo doesn't help. He's been snuggly and affectionate, curling up in my arms and bestowing kisses on my face. I stroke his fur, warm and silky, and let myself sink down, down, down into dreams. I know I walk the dreamworld, but I can't remember my adventures once I wake.
Opals have a reputation for bad luck, because of the way they break if you don't pamper them. No extreme shifts in temperature, no battering with force, careful application of oils so they don't dry out. They've never been unlucky for me.
It's strange, because a thought lurks in the back of my mind whenever I inventory my jewelry: in case of disaster, you've portable wealth. Not that I expect a crisis of such an extent that the banking system and paper money become unusable, and yet. I could wear gold and silver and diamond and rubies and trade them, piece by piece, for necessities.
Maybe it's not such an outré notion, given the times in which we live. Atomic fire over Washington, and how would I react? The possibility seems so remote, though. And I'm able to contemplate it, to game feint and retreat and options.
The true horrors are the ones that I recoil from the slightest contemplation of. Death of beloved family members. Certain types of injury. Far more likely, if you take automobile accident statistics into account. The merest hint and I flinch back, refuse to think about it, because if I did, if it happened, it would be a precipice jerking the ground from under my feet, leaving me to plunge into the abyss. Falling, falling, falling, and I've always suffered from vertigo.
I don't know if I could claw my way back, fingernails sunk into earth, muscles straining, or if I'd land, broken, and never recover.
* * *
Birches
When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy's been swinging them.
But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay.
Ice-storms do that. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-coloured
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground,
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
--Robert Frost (first two stanzas only)
"Ode"
By Maureen N. McLane
Sad in bed you read Horace
the ode in which an aging lover pleads
not to be inflamed again
by a perishable love
and a tear escapes his eye
and a tear escaped your eye.
I was wild for you and heedless
I am glad love to say this
I was afflicted and afflicted you.
Be careful what you wish for
you warned. I was not careful
nor in the end thank god were you.
The charms I recited
the songs I sang
were lit by a light
almost completely impersonal.
Yet what are we but vehicles
of waves we never directly perceive
except those days the light bending
around our bodies becomes our body
—the lovers ablaze on the pyre
My doctor doubled my meds, and life is bearable again. Chemical dependency is such a hydra. Sweet, sweet serotonin, savior of my soul but enabler of my feelings of inadequacy.
At least now I have my protector inked into my skin. Mama still doesn't know. I run my fingers over the slightly-raised lines and smile. He'll guard the long slog of cold days until spring, a silent watcher bringing warmth against the icy winds and snow.
I need to plant my paperwhites, and anticipate the first buds of March.
Wild fancies will begin tomorrow, I know they will. But how to bring them to reality? I know from too many daydreams more alluring than sugar that willpower alone is not enough. There has to be action, even when all I want to do is curl beneath a blanket and pet Boo.
The Innocent One
The watcher guarded the innocent one,
that was their relationship.
When the innocent one was in danger,
had angered the mother or the father
maybe, walked out on some thin ice
on purpose (for the sharp defining edges
of it) and suddenly needed a rescue,
the watcher would be the rescuer.
That allowed the innocent one to grow up
reckless: she was always stabbing herself
in the heart to see what each new kind of love
felt like. Then her savior the watcher
would heal her wound by explaining everything.
We're a very solid couple, the two of us.
We've grown up into a fine double person.
--Chase Twitchell
Mediterranean Trio
I noticed that not far away some boys were playing street cricket, with a wicket marked in chalk on the wall behind the batsman, and was gratified by this sign of enduring British influence. (Corfu, as I dare say you know, was under British rule for about fifty years in the 19th century; here, as in other parts of our Empire, it was our enlightened policy to prepare the inhabitants for self-government by teaching them to play cricket.)
--Selena Jardine, letter to Julia Larwood from Corfu
The Shortest Way to Hades by Sarah Caudwell (1985)
Beloved, among other delights, for having a character named
Hilary, even if we're never informed of gender.
* * *
The God Forsakes Antony
When suddenly at the hour
an invisible troupe is heard passing
with exquisite music, with shouts –
do not mourn in vain your fortune failing you now,
your works that have failed, the plans of your life
that have all turned out to be illusions.
As if long prepared for this, as if courageous,
bid her farewell, the Alexandria that is leaving.
Above all do not be fooled, do not tell yourself
it was only a dream, that your ears deceived you;
do not stoop to such vain hopes.
As if long prepared for this, as if courageous,
as it becomes you who are worthy of such a city;
approach the window with firm step,
and listen with emotion, but not
with entreaties and complaints of the coward,
as a last enjoyment listen to the sounds,
the exquisite instruments of the mystical troupe,
and bid her farewell, the Alexandria you are losing.
--C.P. Cavafy (1863-1933), Rae Dalven translator
"The night before battle, Antony was awakened by musicians traveling out of the city to the enemy camp. He took it as a sign that his protector Dionysus had deserted him." -- Plutarch
* * *
The din of onset resounded.
Over the barley stubble and round the olive trees, crashing through vineyards half-picked when the laborers fled, knocking down the props and treading the grapes into bloody wine, the press of men swayed and mixed and seethed, their mass swelling and bursting like bubbles, rising and settling like yeast. The noise was deafening. Men yelled to one another, or to the enemy, or to themselves; or screamed in some piercing agony beyond what they had known flesh could feel. Shields clashed, horses squealed, each corps of the confederate army shouted its own battle-paean at full stretch of its lungs. Officers roared orders, trumpets blew. Over everything hung a great cloud of rusty, choking dust.
--Fire from Heaven, Mary Renault (1969)