Late Antiquity


Anomalously brash,
provocative (but of what?),
the voice would have belonged
in a classroom of the Sixties, when snooty
literacy flared briefly
at the hour of its death. Now in the Zeroes,
however, his fellow-students
writhe, silently, slightly – equally
disgusted whether he “really” wants
to know or is showing off
(but what?) when he asks,
after the lecture on the Fall of Rome,
“But what *caused the quote Failure of Nerve
unquote? I mean, like,
a few years before they were screwing
anything that moved and worshiping
Aphrodite and soaking in big hot tubs.
Then suddenly they’re down on
all types of sex. Our textbook doesn’t explain it,
and you haven’t either, Professor.”

You know those moments when someone doesn’t
answer a direct question …
Politicians answer another, which wasn’t asked.
Bureaucrats say, “No comment.” Businessmen, cornered,
make pleasantries, plead ignorance,
cry lawyer. But professionals
must bear the unspeakable in their very
flesh. Especially when,
*qua teacher, one is a bottom-feeder
professional, unable
to retire because of pills, mortgage,
sick spouse, junkie kid;
tenure a joke decades old, stuck
at Budweiser State, one loathes all students
but hates this one.
And silent and flushed, one looks at the door,
the window, the clock, till the boy
learns an important lesson.
Or one pulls it together enough to say,
“The issue wasn’t purely sexual.”




The Poetry of Empire


We were taking a course in the Poetry
of Empire. But so swift
is change in today’s world that the Empire
collapsed at midterm.
Students from the new Empire
(they spat, talked in class,
despised the work and anyone
not themselves) quit.
Students from prior Empires
greeted the change as yet another
sardonic, predictable and predicted
allegory, and stayed.
I, from a mere Culture – with
the wit that replaces a past, a passport
stamped by my torturers, someone’s couch
to sleep on, skill at hunger,
and hope for a nicer couch – stayed

because I like the material.
The Poetry of Empire is spacious,
generous. Through it one sees
the poet’s house, neat or charmingly
disheveled. A sleeping child,
and the child eating. Beyond that child,
a career and amours.
Beyond the lawn, a car,
and another, beyond the husband another.
A vast buffet, if one tunnels past
irrelevancies! This poetry
reminds me of my Culture’s, which is all love –
vertiginous love for a queenly, disdainful,
in fact all-powerful woman whom,
tunneling, one can see
weeping and mutilated
in a dark room.

But when I said as much
to our prof, a man of the Empire, he shook
his graying pony-tail,
dismayed that someone like me, as black
and wise as night, should praise Empire
over Culture.
Unalarmed or unaware
that his Empire was no longer there,
and that he himself must sink
from sensitivity to pain, he seemed
day by day more ethereal
to us who remained.
He will survive like a verse,
this one: “It is not for me
to grade, to teach you, but for you to teach me!”
– in one breath begging
love and a curse.