When
you accede to the nightlong city
on
the seven hills, tired, to swallow days
that
quail in the devouring calm,
your
last years piled up on the marble slab
like
satisfying, uncommon food:
if
Fortune hold, as she has held, you’ll find
late
time warm in your veins
as
foretimes were that wind back through earth’s body
to
your birth cry. The pillared city
will
be your past, your memories well-seasoned.
And
godlike it will mutter in you
before
it is staled down to yellow water:
a
history. That you created?
You?
Remembering Pompey, bowelled to the heart
with
guile’s gravel, whom you gave
your
daughter, toothsome naked, then the sharp
of
your naked sword. Both of which
your
soul gasped in. Recalling at Bithynia
(for
Rome’s good) you were ‘queen’, they said,
for
capering in a saffron gown as one
to
please a king at dinner. Remembering
great
Crassus spied your horses given their head:
he
studied you; you studied then
how
the bit is slatted in a bloodier shout
when
they nailed the slaves, six thousand, up
from
Rome to Capua down the Appian Way.
Remembering
your own head speak
in
Further Spain by Alexander’s statue:
stone
by stone, a king calling.
Remembering
your calling in Germania
when
you had flogged to the bone, among
his
peers, a king, till he died. Remembering how
you
wolfed back over the Rubicon
to
drive Pompey to evacuate Rome,
dogging
him to Alexandria
where
your gorge sickened at the dead repast.
When
godlike your bones fork these hills,
Julius
Caesar, you may have bad dreams:
proconsul,
imperator, rex;
how
sage smelt in the dead camp morning; how women
smelt;
consuming orgies; life
on
a talent borrowed; the lower, strict field theory
of
the bloodstream; the sinews’ topographic
strain;
campaigns; and the manship of campaigns….
When
late at night you walk in the still
city,
reswallowing the past, repairing
to
bed before the stars repair,
Caesar,
galled god, your heartburn may say if
you
made these days, these seething days,
or
if each day the day was your creator!
You
may find, god, just what it is
you
are. Before they flank the crown dish in:
Pompey’s
face in gravy on a platter
while
your ship wallows off the Egyptian sands.
