Holiday

How long do you think it would take

to get used to this? This after waking late,

ten minutes past eight, into the third hour of the day.

The light that hung in dust and sprays of roses

shamed us into memory of the old man, his brushed

steps and the crack he’d eased through at dawn

so as not to wake us, up to tend the new born goats,

suckered into being and now proclaiming

the awful brightness of the day to the valley walls.

We had no excuse to rise so late. On a farm

with one electric light there is no place for carousing,

and anyway we’d left dinner quick - if only to escape

the silence, the shadowed sight of a hunched and

toothless man in a face-off with a bowl of rice,

Hugo’s slow translation of how each brick

was carried here by horse, the woman watching

and not eating. People learn to lend their lives

to what’s in front of them, I said, brushing

ten hours’ sleep from my eyes, before we rode

on hired horses away from paradise to fish.

When Odysseus fell off his horse (v.2)

When Odysseus fell off his horse

in the courtyard dust, nobody laughed.

As waves of miniature tsunami tickled

the sides of the water trough, not a stir

in the stable boy, tying and untying

nooses in the shed. Nor did the waiting-girl,

whose aberrant back he’d lashed once more

that morning, work up a smirk

when he tripped on dizzy feet and landed

face first in the shit. In fact, nothing moved

at all. The air hovered still as a bubble

as he got up and dusted down his thighs.

Then one noise - a slow and careful tearing,

a scalpel slit in the sphere of time, and then

a sucking, a taking-in of truth to the hot dark forge

of his throat. Here his life was melted down

and recast into tales for others spaces, other halls,

where he told his waiting audience of how

he galloped Polydorus’ strong backed stallion

to fetch the raging boar and have it home

for dinner. And you, the listener,

don’t see any hint of this sly industry;

lulled, then hooked, you don’t catch a thing

but his mouth, his grin and his tongue

carving up a tale with the sharpness

of a fishwife’s blade, as she guts bass

and tosses the dark innards to the dogs and gulls

whose rabid beaks always look like laughter.

Lines

You thought that it was best

to watch it die and so we went

slowly because otherwise the gauchos

would laugh at us (they laughed

anyway) running up to see a death

so by the time we arrived it was

in between. It jangled on its chain

like how wool on a barbed wire fence

dances in the wind except that this

was making its own motion

                                    

and then they cut its throat and it moved

about the same before they started

skinning it was it dead you asked of course

I said how should I know I said it was

just twitching nerves like when you kill

a fish but either way how much is there

to all this I didn’t say that out loud

though I could see in the others it was clearer

in the corral next to it the sheep were shaking

the sheep were watching all this shaking.

Historical Method

I

Very little is known of the life of Herodotus.

So which of all the chattering scholars could honestly

deny me when I tell you this? Once, as a boy in spring,

not seeing the blue tits for their smallness

in the canopy, he turned to his mother and asked,

“Where do these trees learn to sing so beautifully?”

II

Herodotus edged the sand around his insole until it lined

the dank shadows of his shoe like the shores of a midnight lake.

Then he held it up to the bright sun and, tipping it before his face,

watched the sand gather, slip and fall between his feet.

He knew that one day scientists would scan its isotopes

to deduce its age, knew that they would prove that some of it

had made that desert home for a million years or more, and laughed.

The unceasing dedication to itself, though winds could toss it

anywhere they chose, shape and reshape its temples in the dunes,

roll a ridge over on itself and blow it up into the hair

of any passing man or dying thing – he marvelled at such stout longevity.

Then he dropped some grains between the sheets of his papyrus

and rubbed. When he opened it some words had gone

and he rubbed again. One rumoured battle lost to time.

He laughed again, put on his shoe, and walked out into the dunes

to piss. He thought he’d wait a while afterwards to see his golden

residue, at first a little foaming reservoir, grow smaller in the heat.

III

Another story, true or false: Virgil Earp, Arizona territory, 1878.

It was getting night, and the cold, feeling it was safe again, had started

peeking out from the sagebrush and rushing at his shirt below the arms.

He’d not meant to be caught out so late. All day he’d ridden chafing at the ribs

from one rough copy of Herodotus stuffed inside his coat.

In the morning he had read Book 7 (but really how could you call it reading at all

with such books from childhood? The most you do is let them stroke the soft hair

of your consciousness) and then he’d ridden out with its words lining him:

Thermopylae, Leonidas, the epigraph by Simonides in Bowles’ rendering:

Go tell the Spartans, thou who passes by,

That here, obedient to their laws, we lie.

But it was cold, and cold demands a fire. So some pages from the book

went to satisfy another law and catch on twigs and make a cold man

hot. The smoke meandered up, half thinking at the most, and caught the eye

of some travellers on the ridge across from him. They were Navajo

and took against such statements writ upon the sky. And they’d have scalped

him for it, had they not been old, and had he not had a better weapon

when they came over to complain. Still, they tried, each one shooting arrows

till the last one died, and he rode home, leaving their bodies sending

trails of stench and insects up into the massive Arizona sky.