Complete Poems (15 page)

A bit too heated, this declaration of his. “Always

remain of the Jews, of the holy Jews—”

But he didn’t remain one at all.

the Hedonism and Art of Alexandria

made the boy into their devotee.

“…  it should be loved all the more,

the pleasure that’s attained unwholesomely and in corruption;

only rarely finding the body that feels things as
it
wants to—

the pleasure that, unwholesomely and in corruption, produces

a sensual intensity, which good health does not know …”

A fragment of a missive

from the youth Imenus (of patrician stock), infamous

in Syracuse for dissipation,

in the dissipated times of Michael the Third.

It certainly resembles him, this small

pencil likeness of him.

Quickly done, on the deck of the ship:

an enchanting afternoon.

The Ionian Sea all around us.

It resembles him. Still, I remember him as handsomer.

To the point of illness: that’s how sensitive he was,

and it illumined his expression.

Handsomer, he seems to me,

now that my soul recalls him, out of Time.

Out of Time. All these things, they’re very old—

the sketch, and the ship, and the afternoon.

His every expectation turned out wrong!

He used to imagine that he’d do celebrated deeds,

would end the shame that since the time of the Battle

of Magnesia had ground his homeland down.

That Syria again would be a mighty power,

with her armies, with her fleets,

with her great encampments, with her wealth.

He endured it, grew embittered in Rome

when he sensed, in the conversation of his friends,

the scions of the great houses,

in the midst of all the delicacy and
politesse

that they showed toward him, toward the son

of King Seleucus Philopator—

when he sensed that nonetheless there was always a hidden

disdain for the dynasties of the Greek East:

which were in decline, not up to serious affairs,

quite unfit for the leadership of peoples.

He’d withdraw, alone, and grow indignant, and swear

that it wouldn’t be the way they thought, at all.

Look,
he
has the will:

would struggle, would do it, would rise up.

If only he could find a way to reach the East,

manage to get away from Italy—

and all of this power that he has

in his soul, all this vehemence,

he’d spread it to the people.

Ah, if only he could be in Syria!

He was so little when he left his homeland

that he only dimly remembers what it looks like.

But in his thoughts he’s always studied it

like something sacred you approach on bended knee,

like an apparition of a beautiful place, like a vision

of cities and of harbors that are Greek.—

And now?

                         Now, hopelessness and dejection.

They were right, those lads in Rome.

It’s not possible for them to survive, the dynasties

that the Macedonian Conquest had produced.

No matter: he himself had spared no effort;

as much as he was able, he’d struggled on.

Even in his black discouragement,

there’s one thing that still he contemplates

with lofty pride: that even in defeat

he shows the same indomitable valor to the world.

The rest—was dreams and vain futility.

This Syria—it barely even resembles his homeland;

it is the land of Heracleides and of Balas.

“Where has he gone off to, where did the Sage disappear?

Following his many miracles,

and the great renown of his instruction

which was diffused among so many peoples,

he suddenly went missing and no one has learned

with any certainty what has happened

(nor has anyone ever seen his tomb).

Some have put it about that he died in Ephesus.

But Damis didn’t write that. Damis never

wrote about the death of Apollonius.

Others said that he went missing on Lindos.

Or perhaps that other story is

true, that his assumption took place on Crete,

in the ancient shrine of Dictynna.—

But nonetheless we have the miraculous,

the supernatural apparition of him

to a young student in Tyana.—

Perhaps the time hasn’t come for him to return,

for him to appear before the world again;

or metamorphosed, perhaps, he goes among us

unrecognized.— But he’ll appear again

as he was, teaching the Right Way. And surely then

he’ll reinstate the worship of our gods,

and our exquisite Hellenic ceremonies.”

So he daydreamed in his threadbare lodging—

after a reading of Philostratus’s

“Life of Apollonius of Tyana”—

one of the few pagans, the very few

who had stayed. Otherwise—an insignificant

and timid man—he, too, outwardly

played the Christian and would go to church.

It was the period during which there reigned,

with the greatest piety, the old man Justin,

and Alexandria, a god-fearing city,

showed its abhorrence of those poor idolators.

The actor whom they’d brought to entertain them

declaimed, as well, a few choice epigrams.

The salon opened onto the garden;

and had a delicate fragrance of blooms

that was mingled together with the perfumes

of the five sweetly scented Sidonian youths.

Meleager, and Crinagoras, and Rhianus were read.

But when the actor had declaimed

“Here lies Euphorion’s son, Aeschylus, an Athenian—”

(stressing, perhaps, more than was necessary

the “valour far-renowned,” the “Marathonian lea”),

at once a spirited boy sprang up,

mad for literature, and cried out:

“Oh, I don’t like that quatrain, not at all.

Expressions like that somehow seem like cowardice.

Give—so I proclaim—all your strength to your work,

all your care, and remember your work once more

in times of trial, or when your hour finally comes.

That’s what I expect from you, and what I demand.

And don’t dismiss completely from your mind

the brilliant Discourse of Tragedy—

that Agamemnon, that marvelous Prometheus,

those representations of Orestes and Cassandra,

that
Seven Against Thebes
—and leave, as your memorial,

only that you, among the ranks of soldiers, the masses—

that you too battled Datis and Artaphernes.”

One candle is enough.      Its faint light

is more fitting,
      will be more winsome

when come Love’s—
      when its Shadows come.

One candle is enough.
      Tonight the room

can’t have too much light.
      In reverie complete,

and in suggestion’s power,
      and with that little light—

in that reverie: thus
      will I dream a vision

that there come Love’s—
      that its Shadows come.

The poet Phernazes is working on

the crucial portion of his epic poem:

the part about how the kingdom of the Persians

was seized by Darius, son of Hystaspes. (Our

glorious king is descended from him:

Mithridates, Dionysus and Eupator.) But here

one needs philosophy; one must explicate

the feelings that Darius must have had:

arrogance and intoxication, perhaps; but no—more

like an awareness of the vanity of grandeur.

Profoundly, the poet ponders the matter.

But he’s interrupted by his servant, who comes

running and delivers the momentous intelligence:

The war with the Romans has begun.

Most of our army has crossed the border.

The poet stays, dumbfounded. What a disaster!

How, now, can our glorious king,

Mithradates, Dionysus and Eupator,

be bothered to pay attention to Greek poems?

In the middle of a war—imagine, Greek poems.

Phernazes frets. What bad luck is his!

Just when he was sure, with his “Darius,”

to make his name, and to reduce his critics,

those envious men, to silence at long last.

What a setback, what a setback for his plans!

And if it had only been a setback: fine.

But let’s see if we are really all that safe

in Amisus. It’s not a spectacularly well-fortified land.

The Romans are most fearsome enemies.

Is there any way we can get the best of them,

we Cappadocians? Could it ever happen?

Can we measure up to the legions now?

Great gods, protectors of Asia, help us.—

And yet in the midst of all his upset, and the disaster,

a poetic notion stubbornly comes and goes—

far more convincing, surely, are arrogance and intoxication;

arrogance and intoxication are what Darius would have felt.

She laments in the prologue to her
Alexiad,

Anna Comnena laments her widowhood.

Her soul is in muzzy whirl. “And with

freshets of tears,” she tells us, “I deluge

mine eyes.… Alack the breakers” of her life,

“alack for the upheavals.” Anguish burns her

“unto the very bones and marrow and rending of my soul.”

Nonetheless the truth seems to be that she knew one

mortal grief alone, that power-loving woman:

that she had only one profound regret

(even if she won’t acknowledge it), that supercilious Greekling:

for all of her dexterity she didn’t manage

to secure the Throne; instead he took it

practically right out of her hands, that upstart John.

Let the dilettantes call me dilettante.

In serious matters I have always been

most diligent. And on this I will insist:

that no one has a better knowledge of

Church Fathers or Scripture, or the Synodical Canons.

On every question that he had, Botaniates—

every difficult ecclesiastical matter—

would take counsel with me, me first of all.

But since I’ve been exiled here (curse that spiteful

Irene Ducas) and am frightfully bored,

it’s not at all unseemly if I divert myself

by crafting verses of six or seven lines—

divert myself with mythological tales

of Hermes, and Apollo, and Dionysus,

or the heroes of Thessaly and the Peloponnese;

or with composing strict iambic lines

such as—if I do say so—the litterateurs

of Constantinople don’t know how to write.

That strictness, most likely, is the reason for their censure.

The fulfillment of their illicit pleasure

is accomplished. They’ve risen from the bed,

and dress themselves quickly without speaking.

They emerge separately, covertly, from the house. And while

they walk rather uneasily in the street, it seems

as if they suspect that something about them betrays

what kind of bed they’d fallen into just before.

Nonetheless, how the artist’s life has gained.

Tomorrow, the day after, or through the years he’ll write

powerful lines, that here was their beginning.

Oh I’m not put out because my chariot’s

wheel was smashed, and I’m down one silly win.

I shall pass the night among fine wines

and lovely roses. All Antioch is mine.

I am the most exalted of young men.

I’m Balas’s weakness, the one he worships.

Tomorrow, you’ll see, they’ll say the race wasn’t proper.

(But if I were vulgar, and had secretly given the order—

they’d even have placed my crippled chariot first, the flatterers.)

The aging of my body and my looks

is a wound from a terrible knife.

I have no means whatsoever to endure it.

Unto you I turn, Art of Poetry,

you who know something of drugs;

of attempts to numb pain, in Imagination and Word.

It’s a wound from a terrible knife.—

Bring on your drugs, Art of Poetry,

which make it impossible—for a while—to feel the wound.

The theme, “The Character of Demaratus,”

which Porphyry has suggested to him in conversation,

the young scholar outlined as follows

(intending, afterwards, to flesh it out rhetorically).