Orbiana

I could never help uttering a light soupir,
Just one, whenever the times
Were hard; today
Just one more, it hardly passed my lips,
But murdered they were, such news,
Murdered near Mayence, those two
Who sent me here, to Leptis Magna.

The emperor was never up to it, really,
In peace or war. She governed, Julia Mamaea,
Selecting me for him. So when she found,
To her astonishment, that I, a tiddler,
Had it in me to influence Alexander,
She packed me off, with his consent –
Nobody knew where. Nobody, either, now
Will inquire where I come from, nobody
Will know which city in Africa
Took me in, so I have disappeared.

But the shopping is quite splendid.
In this great new city of arcades,
Several temples to various divinities,
A triumphant arch, the amphitheatre
And almost superfluous fortifications,
There are nice people to listen to
And black weavers who manufacture
Singular objects to recline or to stand on.

Yes, for the Christians Mother had a soft spot;
From Syria once she had a cavalry escort sent
To save that tyke, whatever his name was.
It starts like mine with O and R.
I like to beachcomb. It attracts,
Ha ha, I mean the beach attracts provincials.
And yet, and yet . . . From Rome
And from Pamphylia come

Real artists with guitars, who chant
Devotedly of ocean, even to the moon –
I never had children, what a shame,
And the years of loving, few, complicated
By Mother, them I've forgotten now.
The shopping gets, by the way, a bit
Monotonous. Funds I was allowed
Exhaust themselves, somehow,
Even though I did, if I remember rightly,
Stir up a nasty fracas, insist
On statutory imperial support.

I feel behoved to say (don't ever quote me
On this) that I am not yet negligible,
Negligible enough to mark the passage
From finite to infinite. I was not one to wheedle,
But those officiants, what rot they talk –
Into the atoms they ship their designated
Sacrifices, not into some dock of heaven.
Where bodies tasted chance, they make a waste.

You should see me glimpse, now and then,
Into the shrinking bijou bag under my bed.

The wind cooling profuse vegetation
And the display of stars at nightfall
Are supposed to console. They don't.
Disease, at least, is hereabouts minimal.
What a mercy my destination was not Mauretania.
That's such a long, long way west.
And Mauretanians, they do say,
Are a scruffy lot. Please write
To your little friend, Orbiana.

 

The First Portrait

Then she went and died on us,
Just like that. And her face, extinct.
We saw nothing move in it, trouble it,
Or rest content, or yawn, or give her smile,
Or even scowl, for us to laugh at.

* * *

Then we watched while the knife man
Cut off her head. We watched
And took out our loudest voices,
And twisted them in hoots, yelps,
Groaning as the scoop went in;
Spring water washed away the gunk;
Till that was done we howled.

* * *

Then came the woman with her clay
And stuffed the skull with it,
And made her face again, the face
We could not bear to never see.

* * *

A clay face for her, any moment now
See its motions; so for her alone
We copied, breathless, the big silence.

* * *

But to give her all the credit,
Body and head we buried together.
Her clay face had to belong down there.
Our underground is memory of her,
For her the memory is part of us
Who anyway forget. How else
To undo our division?

* * *

Gossips will say an ostrich
Invented such a funeral custom.
We hope her clay-featured egg,
Not popping so its eyes of sea-shell,
Will hatch and she return to us,
Or with her glance encourage others,
Good kin, who drink at Jericho
The waters of our spring.

Note: A man's skull with the face modelled in clay [Natufian, Proto-Neolithic, c.B.C.7500, was excavated at Jericho. See Graham Clark, World Prehistory: An Outline 1962.]

 

A Demon Sniggering

(On reading Anna Moschovakis' poem 'Six Nights')

"Poetry," said a voice, "should not
Do philosophy." What withering Platonism

Was this? Or, hawked by a shrunken pundit,
A neat political scheme? Of itself,

Utterly other than propositional discourse
(Mimetic maybe, but memory's instance

Leaving "a snail's trail of grass-halms bent
Darker against the dew"), poetry bleeds,

And some of it brands (in its veins philosophical
Fire) thought that "ordains what abides."

The codes converge, the codes,
At times they miscegenate, as gods

Come alive in a freshness haunting
Hope, in unharmful belief.

They do seek it out, in the citizen —
Freshness, to ventilate

Atavisms, change them into
Productions, of justice, of the good.

Your Aeschylus gave Athena this to do.
Then one by one the furious

Eumenides, at her philosophizing well,
Freshened, into food. Freshly, yet,

Voice, you did so turn the words
As to discern, in their penumbra,

A demon sniggering too,
As facts, turned ugly, speak true.

[The quotation in lines 7-8 is from Diana George's story 'Filzbad', in Chicago Review 51, 3, 2005 ]

Copyright © Christopher Middleton, 2006.

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Christopher Middleton lives in Austin, Texas. His most recent collection is Tankard Cat (Sheep Meadow Press), also available from Carcanet Press in the UK as The Anti-Basilisk.