Cypresses

for Greg Nagy

 

Slim shadows, ragged, slightly deformed, not tall,

they were green young athletes once, who, lacking physique

and horse-sense, killed themselves when they jumped on the turn

in the chariot-race. And now they wait for the ferry,

puzzling where between life and death they are,

almost persuaded they’ve hit the ground running.

 

 

Anisychia

 

Death’s little wild friend, chattering Anisychia,

already my courier, pushing my trolley from here

to the Peloponnese, proclaiming our personal weather

 

with aerosol plumes and a data-dump: gut reaction

of ancient machinery, revving the malware, the mischief;

never-quite-lying alarm-monger, tacking two S’s to ‘care’,

curating my uninhabitable Chair,

 

in my tourist bus my kingsize beds my hair – Anisychia!

whipping me over the underworld’s hills, hell-circling charioteer.

When Hypnos bangs out the lights, he’s my cinematographer.

 

 

Temple

 

I watch the old couple, hands linked, like children

on the broad stairway towards the hill-top temple.

The one who limps is talkative, brightly alert.

The other, tall, half-smiling, doesn’t quite know where he is.

 

How desperate I used to be for young love!

I was twenty, the years since school raced hard, I was losing

shamefully, indescribably, some contest

with growing-up. So I got married, still twenty,

 

and served myself from the urn of mixed delights

and toxins. Now I think, what was the rush?

Old love is best, the real and useful marriage

of minds, administered by impediment.

 

The old couple steady each other, careful

over the slippery, pearly stone. I pass them,

single, envious, eager to be the first

to reach the altar-less wreck of the god’s temple.

 

 

Poems from The Mixed Urn, Syracuse University Press, 2019. Copyright 2019 by Carol Rumens, reprinted by permission of the author.

Cypresses at Olympia
Cypresses at Olympia. Image by Andy Hay, modified. https://flic.kr/p/KhCUGy