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  Antiquity

  Copyright © 2016 Michael Homolka

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Homolka, Michael.

  [Poems. Selections]

  Antiquity: poems / by Michael Homolka. — First edition.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-941411-27-8 (pbk.: acid-free paper)

  I. Title.

  PS3608.O494436A6 2015

  811'.6—dc23

  2015027060

  Cover design and interior by Kristen Radtke.

  Cover image by Brian Powers.

  Manufactured in Canada.

  This book is printed on acid-free paper.

  Sarabande Books is a nonprofit literary organization.

  This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

  The Kentucky Arts Council, the state arts agency, supports Sarabande Books with state tax dollars and federal funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.

  for PAJ

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction by Mary Ruefle

  1

  Goshen

  Second Goshen

  Third Goshen

  Fourth Goshen

  Fifth Goshen

  Sixth Goshen

  Seventh Goshen

  Ode on Quote How to Live

  Antiquity

  Anamnesis

  Circumstances

  Retreat

  2

  Out at the Mall

  Listen Up Medusa

  Riposte to Ode

  Personal Narrative

  Broken Home

  Endurance

  Frame

  Phenomenon

  Restoration

  Unjustified Mood on a Monday Evening

  3

  Ruins

  Modern Sensibility

  East

  Villa View Drive

  West

  Artifact

  Transients

  History Moves in Waves

  A History of Art

  Emanation

  Men on the Road

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Introduction

  The book you are holding in your hands is called Antiquity, and it’s filled with poems as new as April crocuses. Or as old as April crocuses, for as John Berger points out, if poetry sometimes speaks of its own immortality, it has nothing to do with individual genius, but with the fact that poetry “abandons itself to language, in the belief that language embraces all experience, past, present, and future.” The poems in Antiquity very much abandon themselves to language, to the collective poetic endeavor, and they do so in a rich, textured, and sustained voice, though out of a self that is “flexible in its adherence / to a particular time period.” Hence a poem set at the mall but written after Martial, hence “Napoleon off / at boarding school,” hence “Listen Up Medusa,” hence “He who had pretended to be dead / pops up out of the cart.” Like a crocus, we could say. What’s antiquity anyway but a thing that is always lurking beneath the surface, not only in the sense of its influence—then shaping now—but in the sense our now will so soon be a then.

  And so: could be Goshen, land of the Israelites, could be Goshen, New Jersey. We have our floods, our epidemics, our wars. “Each of us seems convinced he is the sole member of the family running home from the battle at Marathon bearing / good news We have fought bravely and survived.” Of course no one survives, but the book’s subjects—history, paintings, language—are things that have survived thus far, to the extent we are tempted to ask a question: History, paintings, language, what else is there? Personal experience, that constantly decaying thing? Homolka addresses the question, slyly eschewing experience in more than one poem, slyly hanging onto it in others. Nonetheless, the experience of the reader cannot be denied—if we read at all it is to have an experience—even if that experience is no more (or no less, depending on your view) than to catch the light and “sit and discuss / the reflections.” And what if this book, by virtue of its intelligence and in spite of its exhilaration, leaves us with a sense of spiritual weariness; what if the book leaves us wanting to be gladder and more puffed up? Consider most of all that if such wishes were granted, we wouldn’t have these marvelous poems, poems that remind us how easy it is, really, to talk to Horace.

  —Mary Ruefle, 2015

  1

  Goshen

  Everywhere in heaven’s meadows

  Aryans jack each other off

  under the willows

  breezily

  The year Jews’ permits are collected

  words of consolation

  sprinkle like seed

  across their bellies

  Over the leafy coastlines of southern

  Berlin purest oxygen

  slathers the air in

  suntan lotion

  The destitute teethe at fatigues of cadets

  launching themselves toward

  some more inward

  six day war

  While out of the backs of chariots

  emaciated lovers receive star

  after star after

  star

  Second Goshen

  They’re really going

  to kill us all It bears repeating

  inferences trickling

  in little by little like aphids

  I would have to have known history

  not been so close to it

  I couldn’t make sense of it

  where unmatched scrubs

  lie draped across the barracks

  bunks like forest markers

  fate meanwhile continuing

  its innocuous silence

  They can murder us each

  only once It bears repeating

  so many believing till the last

  moment we’d be spared

  Praise God O

  Praise God you can hear

  spoken again and again

  from the hedges and viburnum

  Third Goshen

  Bright orange koi

  in ponds ringing paradise

  The Aryan gentleman

  promises me things

  Wearing a tulip

  behind his ear

  wagging his petit

  black-and-white

  buttocks Betty Boop

  style regales me

  with such as islands

  for tumbling

  thickets for splaying

  barrels and waterfalls

  for starting afresh

  all the richness

  of life’s vicissitudes

  I take his glosses

  at face value convinced

  he just wants

  the best for me

  and my family

  who gave their

  oils and corals

  moss manna and soil alike

  up for the future

  But he falls instead

  to swimming with

  bright orange koi

  by ivy-latticed

  lawns of the homeland

  weaving his Goldilocks

  curls with mint

  swaying suggestively

  in a light sarong

  Simple to see

  the creatures in whom

  he meant to inspire

  kinship only

  swim on unmoved

  I love the koi

  I thought I loved

  him but no

  to the koi and koi

  alone I feel loyal

  Their loose glow

  captures the closeness

  the family once felt

  stories till late

  each of us cast

 
; as saviors draped

  in loofahs and

  minks O Clark

  Gable O Pavlova

  They see me

  waking with aught

  but cinders for a heart

  as our Aryan lovely

  assures he can save

  us but flays my mother

  and father instead

  styling their remains

  into potpourri

  frisées as I look

  on and allow it

  residing as he does

  in the calmest of camps

  prisoner yes

  but bright orange koi

  swishing his long

  tail among beautiful pearls

  Fourth Goshen

  Coiled around the family’s neck

  Himmler’s intestines

  comfort and protect us

  our promiscuous spirits

  swarming his passageways

  unromantic amino-esque

  The hero sings maidenly

  songs in the fields as he reaps

  and some mountains drift past

  All his uncles waste away

  in paradise’s black caverns

  wavering over the dining room table

  each of them eighty

  hair cropped short cooing

  monkey see monkey do

  to adolescent selves

  Look at their organs

  pirouette through the air

  free with Himmler’s

  mingling among amethyst

  bracelets of self-preservation

  Our half meanwhile

  enjoys each other’s torsos best

  and undulates in simple spirals

  out across the soul’s gray bags

  We watch our psyches’ enzymes

  all grow glum with time

  we squint to discern

  how the rules might

  change again postwar

  Fifth Goshen

  Our enemy meditates on its bottle gourd tree

  As atolls tremble each removes

  his burlap scarf takes the unguent at hand

  (Vaseline of ancestors the wind has spit up

  toward thunderclouds and tidal waves) and smears

  it across his eyelids and genitals

  the uterus too

  since that’s the region our enemy wanders most

  vexed vast and alone

  horizon-high stalks turning the blood to gas

  Sixth Goshen

  We see what we did was wrong

  because we’re being punished

  specifically because of that

  but still we under-

  stand and feel remorse

  Give the Hälftlings

  back their wives from the amber

  whose forced inching

  never quite leaves the nerves

  We enjoyed

  doing as we did entrapping

  their prophets in swamps

  first up to the ankles

  then up to the neck

  releasing crested eagles into the air

  as augurs for saviors

  and then not saving them

  Such pastoral settings we offered

  that much to our credit

  such unsung serenity

  Seventh Goshen

  Our enemy ponders upward of eons

  the nature of those trees

  that were to be their inheritance

  Forest and desert rise up from the scalp

  as their men still drift perplexed

  releasing victims

  out of a sense of obligation

  The limpid evening swells with spores

  The Aryans are afoot the silence

  is freeing Look

  crusts of stars no longer horny

  or restless to conceive

  Ode on Quote How to Live

  Experience counts for something

  I feel it sickly around me and disappointing

  none of its images quite adding up

  Better to stand off to the side

  for now of all familiar voices

  get rid of the idioms and inhabit

  whatever dilating silence

  makes itself most prominent

  given the right dark trees

  the right foreign towns

  for dead textbooks with erasable smileys

  on smudged pages’ edges

  to rest right up against my misgivings

  The specificity of our historical

  moment fails to offer any

  of the anticipated breadth of feeling

  Or just our symbols are failing

  all this surplus aloneness

  in the face of times less lucid than our own

  Exhausted all day I fall short of fully living

  and maintain only the stigmas

  Experience matters I know

  or whatever experience stands for

  I can’t write off the gamey

  smell of events with their relentless

  literalness and casual qualities

  moments of blankness dropping off daily

  and no one’s heart quite in it

  Antiquity

  Follow me imprinted upon walkway sand

  by a beautiful espadrilled boy

  red lipped high waisted

  patting at his perfumed wig

  each limb in motion

  though as a whole motionless

  The day’s intelligentsia

  attempt to sense-check

  his prepubescent meandering

  who has never heard

  lustful used in quite this way

  Along the workerish district Follow me

  pillared and redly lit before morning

  though some who study

  the markings still think sacrosanct

  The lateness of the hour

  laurels itself Pity the benighted

  all our lineated clarities

  and able to stomach so little

  no not much for fuzzy territory we

  Anamnesis

  My final self fluttered once

  that version which isn’t

  waiting for anything

  and flexible in its adherence

  to a particular time period

  I was napping alone

  in summer noon whatever

  century the daylight resembled

  when the world of allegory

  and metaphor let fall

  tiny Roman statuettes

  onto my bony intestines

  So sprouted other

  inwardnesses more manifold

  more true debatably

  and more mournful too

  I felt made of marble

  I felt gods in my blood

  It was like there was nothing

  wherever I’d lived before

  Circumstances

  A stone drops constantly

  down through my sternum

  down toward its spiritual

  basin of granite

  or toward my having

  overworked myself

  and one day waking up dead

  (much to the stone’s advantage?)

  The stone has got to be aware

  because it whistles so

  loud down its well toward my

  self-centric heart I can’t

  consider anything

  other than the stone

  It’s a stone in my chest and it hurts

  like a sunburnt beach

  or a mayfly glubbing through sap

  Most charming of all

  like anything which harms

  anything else there isn’t

  a reason in sight

  Retreat

  Everyone here feels sorry

  for everyone else

  having wandered

  Königsberg bridges alone

  and determined our lives

  conspicuously tiny

  Second week by a bare bulb

&nb
sp; as far back as possible

  away from the balcony

  the same blue stain gives way

  to each of our inward

  game reserves

  where snow dogs come out

  unnoticed the same

  hour every evening

  As for the central statue

  no one understands

  quite how to walk around it