These poems and their “postlude” are reprinted with the permission of The Classical Outlook.° They first appeared in C.O. 100.4, pp. 235–37.
The ant that creeps across my page
cares nothing for the wordy street
in which he’s taking center stage,
and stops to wipe his inky feet
on the whole hard, heroic age.
What can he know of Achilles’ rage?
Nothing, the reason being that
I turn the leaf.
Time lays us flat.
aigilips (adj.) – destitute even of goats, hence, steep, sheer. lsj.
The race of goats, it would appear
is fond of ground that’s steep or sheer.
But sometimes even goats retreat
(although they’re clever on their feet)
from risky cliffs: as Homer says,
such places are aigilipes.
And a green fear my spirit grips,
as I cling here, aigilips,
to where we’ve climbed—two human motes
dwarfed by vastly absent goats.
How charming of you, Hesiod, to write.
This evening as the immemorial Night
covers the earth with his complacent dark,
I thought, dear boy, your poem hit the mark.
God has grown old. Some newer god will rise.
The young moon takes her sickle to the skies.
Æneas
would have driven a sensible Prius.
But to remind everyone he was pious,
he would have pronounced it “Prius.”
Let me start by saying that I’m really Nobody. I’m halfway through a literature Ph.D., which I prolong by stealthily unweaving my dissertation at night; by day, I’m a poet and teacher. My classes occasioned all of these poems. “Myrmidon” I wrote while reading the Iliad nestled in the crook of a large, sun-warmed bronze sculpture by Henry Moore, until a librarian shooed me off it. There really was an ant, but I did not squish him by turning the page. The ant is alive and traipsing across other epics, for all I know.
My favorite thing to teach is the Odyssey, but I struggle to write good poems about it because A. E. Stallings keeps taking my best ideas, often decades before they occur to me. I try to write poems that my students would enjoy reading twice. One of them recently told me that something I’d written was “like a professional poem,” which is maybe the harshest criticism ye leveled at my work—and I say that as someone who has rhymed “harpies” with “sharpies” in a love poem. I also write raps about garum and classical Greek grammar, but my students’ cynicism about these treats is undiminished. If philosophy is the art of dying well, then my philosophy involves a chariot accident on the set of Gladiator III and an elegy from Vin Diesel’s Boethius.