Antiquity Read online

  Artifact

  Blood red ivy fringes the handles

  of my latest amphora not yet glazed

  Dried-up stream of dirt-scrubbed clues

  crosshatchings chipped pigment

  bones that appear always to have been

  broken into inaudible shards

  I forget myself

  so easily forget that here in the gullies

  where stars long since exploded

  once buried their light I too

  had somewhere to be only a moment ago

  descending the beveled hills

  toward the temple rubble

  My robes felt fresh and new

  washed only once at the river

  when annoyed about my reputation

  I scribbled on the tavern wall

  Varus dreams of nothing but jugs of wine

  and Cupid’s arrow forgive me

  if I should ever desire another

  betrayed the lover who’d had no reason

  not to trust me

  Only last evening

  dozing alone under some small-time

  Vesuvius I imagined my villa

  overrun with olive groves a white ocean

  murmuring at my ear Poised at the wheel

  I hardly noticed my own presence

  until too late I snapped awake

  under a low ceiling hands puzzling

  lifetimes later over the wet

  clay of a vessel left unfinished

  Transients

  Two breezes blow into a bar

  The first one asks the second

  What’s it like

  to die a natural death?

  Strafing the countertops

  by the windows’ red moons

  the bartender orders

  a dry martini

  and a clear conscience

  Soon everyone orders one

  till all of history

  strolls in through the back

  tsk-tsk’ing The last guy

  to order that

  ended up dead

  I think it was one of the recent

  Caesars yes and he was

  wandering around

  freer than I’d ever seen him

  History Moves in Waves

  Lou Costello searches his pockets

  and finds he’s fallen out of love

  The ocean feels harder to follow now

  drifting in browns and grays

  the way each decade’s fashions

  stray from the last

  Television flecks

  in light-green coin shapes

  pale and glitter through Hollywood fog

  The ocean is its own specimen

  and Lou Costello his own

  Laughter piles up in the colors below

  which he still cannot understand

  So he stops paying close attention

  A History of Art

  There is Christ’s birth there is Christ’s death

  a few sedatives in between

  Eventually an architectural

  annunciation beam (a bluebird flaps overhead)

  and the voices of everyone

  who slightly irritates me

  Emanation

  1

  Wrapped in bedclothes a lord flees his rooms Churches closed no priest to be had He runs to inscribe his own name among the register of deaths Only a week since boils broke out on his son whom he did not tend The corpse lay like an anchor in the house till a stranger was paid to cart it away Garden vineyard gold without end No longer a future but a constant refrain this one dying that one dead Where best to expire field bushes some nearby road? The town grows a heart of innumerable wolves

  2

  Lizard ill with leaves of wild lettuce

  Water without danger without wine

  Emerald placed on the tongue

  The melodious mind should avoid

  running jumping jealousy

  anger Neither drunk nor yet too sober

  Bells are rung cannon discharged

  a house rubbed down with handkerchiefs

  Webs everywhere air in motion

  Serenity to wash with urine

  strained through a cloth

  Maddest of all the stinking billy goats

  No man should think of death

  3

  The most beautiful girls

  have abandoned all pretensions

  scurrying like shadows in search of food

  Fathers’ children leave to die

  children from their parents fly

  The fortunate dragged

  to a field and burnt

  others gnawed by dogs

  Minor friars overcome

  remain in the rooms of the dying

  Some live soberly others singing

  That no sick body should be near

  Rushed to the graves to bury themselves

  Or carried away not quite dead

  merged blood red to yellow

  Was that not sad and painful to relate

  I died with thirteen of my house on that same date?

  4

  Crawling down among the dead long upon a heap of corpses

  Fruit is slight money mute Oh let us lie hard

  Read to us in the upper orchard as the number of priests

  decreases

  and old linen envelops the Lamb a thousandfold submissive

  Ripe grapes truly I would tear thee to pieces

  Having said this in morning remains by afternoon

  5

  Poisonous stars wander the sky

  till historians fall off as rags and the dead

  are no longer counted

  Dogs go mad circling the hospitals in pairs

  A metal statue speaks a rain of snakes descends

  Blind threads please protect the doors

  of those not yet infected

  Failure of first origin inorganic air

  developing on the lips of the dead

  Thought itself turns to vinegar

  The soil a wash of cesspool and scarf

  Cloaks travel bags trunks

  A swine is born of a lamb A goat of a horse

  Too few vultures for the cartfuls of nobles

  6

  Plaster the wounds no longer announcing

  What news the couriers bring

  jeweled halls costly furniture esteem of men

  Young man pursue pursue

  Alight ostentatious on the system of castes

  Imperial markets recede into marsh

  Quick before parsons abate

  go wed the wild bird

  7

  New behaviors neither rain nor snow can touch

  Dancers dance holes which reach the waist

  The heavens open pathological

  Too bold too hard the unexpected harmonies

  marriages so numerous

  Men begin to make new clothes

  Considerable scandal the full-fledged dandy

  Cushions under the head still stained with tears

  Water pure and clear as any ever issued

  Light spreads over the roadsides

  He who had pretended to be dead

  pops up out of the cart

  Men on the Road

  Men on the road have got some stories

  They’ve seen Achilles in flip-flops

  drifting from room to rented room

  still vaguely fleeing Poseidon

  along the muted Western frontier

  Men on the road don’t talk a lot but when they do

  they tell you tales of lion skins and missile husks

  strewn across their native fields

  stray shells too held on to as reminders

  Men on the road go sliding their hands

  down shorts of adolescent

  boys whose wealthy fathers

  they’ve known for years or met

  that night at the bar They ask them what they

  think it means and how it touch
es

  their sense of spiritual identity

  I met a man on the road

  once and said take your hand away

  then said it again and he did and soon was gone

  but I felt regretful later deeply doubtful

  Men on the road sense absences

  rope-soled shoes boosted from trail guides

  exactly perpendicular

  with the edge of the motel carpet

  as flecks of their own dried skin

  collect Train car still to be ridden

  home on ties not quite yet laid

  each day’s dust floats back through unlit air

  where men on the road overhear

  the occasional couple conversing across the hall

  Clubfeet is all that’s audible

  above the gentle TV static a woman’s voice

  like a mother’s or a nurse’s

  and a man’s accompanying noises

  Men on the road plan their own funerals

  imagining music and streams of weeping ephebes

  weeping not for death but for what was

  acted upon them once by the corpse

  and for the similar urges now straining within

  Out on a hillside (the voices pool

  freer and freer) someone’s kid

  was born with clubfeet

  Acknowledgments

  AGNI: “Goshen,” “Second Goshen”

  Barrow Street: “Ode on Quote How to Live,” “Retreat”

  Boulevard: “Endurance”

  Connotation Press: “Circumstances,” “Ruins,” “Men on the Road,”

  “Villa View Drive”

  The Cortland Review: “Anamnesis”

  Court Green and Poetry Daily: “A History of Art”

  Hayden’s Ferry Review: “History Moves in Waves”

  Literary Imagination: “Restoration”

  New Orleans Review: “East” (published as “from East”)

  The New Yorker: “Riposte to Ode”

  Parnassus: “Out at the Mall”

  Plume: “Listen Up Medusa,” “Personal Narrative”

  Sonora Review: “Frame”

  The Threepenny Review: “Artifact”

  West Branch: “West” (published as “Family IV”)

  Witness: “Emanation,” sections 2, 3, 4, 6 (published as “Emanation,

  I–V”)

  Thank you to my mother, my father, and my sister.

  Thank you to Kesselfam and to Vincent.

  Thank you, Tamara.

  Thank you to Kitt, Krishan, Albert, and Dennis.

  Thank you to Timothy Liu, Major Jackson, April Bernard, and

  Amy Gerstler.

  Thank you to Patricia Dunn, Lynette Creasy, Sarah Wallace, and

  Alfred Turco.

  Thank you to Sarah Gorham, Kristen Radtke, and Ariel Lewiton.

  Credit: Tamara Arellano

  Michael Homolka’s poems have appeared in publications such as Antioch Review, Boulevard, The New Yorker, Parnassus, Ploughshares, and The Threepenny Review. A graduate of Bennington College’s MFA program, he lives and works in New York City.

  The Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry

  2014

  Jordan Zandi, Solarium

  Selected by Henri Cole

  2013

  Sean Bishop, The Night We’re Not Sleeping In

  Selected by Susan Mitchell

  2012

  Trey Moody, Thought That Nature

  Selected by Cole Swensen

  2011

  Lauren Shapiro, Easy Math

  Selected by Marie Howe

  2010

  David Hernandez, Hoodwinked

  Selected by Amy Gerstler

  2009

  Julia Story, Post Moxie

  Selected by Dan Chiasson

  2008

  Karyna McGlynn, I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl

  Selected by Lynn Emanuel

  2007

  Monica Ferrell, Beasts for the Chase

  Selected by Jane Hirshfield

  2006

  Gabriel Fried, Making the New Lamb Take

  Selected by Michael Ryan

  2005

  Matthew Lippman, The New Year of Yellow

  Selected by Tony Hoagland

  2004

  Simone Muench, Lampblack & Ash

  Selected by Carol Muske-Dukes

  2003

  Karen An-hwei Lee, In Medias Res

  Selected by Heather McHugh

  2002

  Carrie St. George Comer, The Unrequited

  Selected by Stephen Dunn

  2001

  Rick Barot, The Darker Fall

  Selected by Stanley Plumly

  2000

  Cate Marvin, World’s Tallest Disaster

  Selected by Robert Pinsky

  1999

  Deborah Tall, Summons

  Selected by Charles Simic

  1998

  Aleida Rodríguez, Garden of Exile

  Selected by Marilyn Hacker

  1997

  James Kimbrell, The Gatehouse Heaven

  Selected by Charles Wright

  1996

  Baron Wormser, When

  Selected by Alice Fulton

  1995

  Jane Mead, The Lord and the General Din of the World

  Selected by Philip Levine

  Sarabande Books is a nonprofit literary press located in Louisville, KY, and Brooklyn, NY. Founded in 1994 to champion poetry, short fiction, and essay, we are committed to creating lasting editions that honor exceptional writing. For more information, please visit sarabandebooks.org.