Grecian Urn


In August, the city empty,
Madame forgets her name.  She scarcely needs it
for the tourists, wilting with their dollars
at the curbs; for the *beurs
she may also pass, who have roamed,
God alone knows how, thus far
into civilization; for the girl
of questionable ancestry who sells
her bread; or for the residents
of her building, at whom alone
she smiles, to whom she is Madame,
the last of a grand breed.
Grandfather, minor minister of Petain’s,
Papa, who died in Algiers,
two husbands on the same wall,
and her priest know and conserve
who she is.  At evening,
she waits for her game-show, knits,
and the various precipitates
that might in others form
grief condense
in her into a kind of happiness.

Meanwhile on a louche
affordable riviera, Bob
from Leeds splashes on
an execrable cologne
that will, however, dissipate
as mellow evening yields to the mild night.
In this too he is fortunate,
for the skirt
he meets at the Irish place
isn’t the usual hunting local wog
but a nice girl, a sensible girl
from Bristol.  She likes
that he isn’t the usual yob
smashing the pub at the score;
that his room has a bit of a view
of the sea beyond other towers;
that he’s attentive to her needs;
and though, in the morning,
they talk about meeting
in London or again in Portugal,
she knows that he’s as glad as she
that he’s only Bob from Leeds.

At Kinko’s and the pizza place
where he makes his rent and meals,
they think he’s some sort of nerd
or geek.  He feels
the irony and the insult
deeply, but doesn’t speak; he needs
no computer or diploma
or friend.  He has
his work, and all the books he steals,
borrows, and sometimes solemnly buys
for it. – Plotinus does not have
the last word on the One.  The split
in the divine unconsciousness
that Schelling posited before Creation
implies plurality, in fact Pleroma:
there will be gods.  He’ll see to it.
At dawn, his writing done,
he likes to walk, immune from thugs,
to a certain bench, in future days
a shrine, gaze at Manhattan,
and wrap his trembling arms around
the meager frame Athena hugs.

They’re happy because, well before
the Novel disintegrated,
they saw it coming.  They forget:
were they in the same one?
Unlikely – probably not.
It might have been interesting.
But finally no hand of petty lives,
however dealt, no eager jack or queen
will save the great bourgeois genre,
the bourgeoisie itself disintegrating.
And so they migrated,
freeing themselves from contact and from plot.
Within what none may call
unsentimentally a private hell,
in the clean wind of non-comparison,
they wear their fates and stories like a shell.
Better like this; truer.
With immortality on offer
at a cheaper rate:
not having to cooperate,
and choosing one’s best side to be
preserved in the hard vacuum of poetry.


(Note: beurs - nasty French slang for Arab immigrants.)