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| gary metras |  | 1. HISTORY AS HOBBY We climb worn marble stairs into a night of glaring electric lamps. Castor and Pollux greet us in marble, naked, thrice as tall as a man; to the side of each a pony as pale as the moon. Then a bronze Marcus Aurelius, right arm stretched in salute, silent equestrian dominating the square. Michelangelo moved him here as honor, even though his gold was robbed, melted down to serve others' pleasures. Empires rise and fall; nations fade or reform. Aurelius knew this and watches, says nothing, this last great stoic. We walk through Piazza del Campidoglio, leave this century to stand at a stone wall overlooking the Roman Forum, ruins from first century backlit like some stage set sunken in an urban valley excavated beneath brick, stone, stucco. Only a few columns stand between temple arches raised so moderns can imagine the festivals of Vespasian and Saturn, the singing, girls twirling, braziers glowing long into the night. Cows once grazed there; peasants squatted in huts; it was their right, until Caesar forced them out. The public good demanded columns and façades, speeches and celebrations. Now it is shattered stone and dust preserved by government decree, history as hobby, reclaimed as time and money allow. No Legions march victorious beneath the Arch of Septimius Severus, returning victorious from campaigns in Palatine. No crowds ecstatic in cheer, just tourists bunched like vegetables atop a cart in the market square. The applause is elsewhere, for a few tenors and sopranos, for leather steering wheels tightly held at 200 kph, before they sit to pasta, bread, and a bottle of deep, dark Castello Banfi. 2. STORM You smell anger in the air. It could be reports of gun fire on The Great Liberator Street in Fallujah, Allah Is Great Square in Najaf, or the acrid odor of car bombs outside the Green Zone. But it is only the leading edge of washed out Hurricane Bonnie-its wind and rain slapping the back of my shirt as it caught me weeding the flower garden. When I look up my face blossoms with rain. Cone flowers, black-eyed-susans, phloxes sway then bend. Their scents scatter until all you can smell is anger. They seem so helpless, though weather is their element. Their lives are this. The sun, the rain, the moon waxing. A young Marine lies on the side of the road. The humvee smoke and wreckage. Clouds drifting across his eyes, though the sky is clear. A woman in a veil walks by, flowers bundled under one arm, the other blown away by storm. 3. THE CAVE MEN At daybreak the harlot emerged. She sat in the silence of the innocent sun. She sat astride a truth she ignored for there to be even a grammar of happiness. "I am by birth an heiress," she said. "I am the mother of mountains, of mushrooms, and princes." When men still slept in trees, they knew women dominated the world from the womb. Hope and love were still an empty circle like an O, like a damp cave that something urged them to enter. And they did. 4. THE GHOST OF LOVE: A VALENTINE OF LOSS i. The blue light in the midnight fist of Orion slipped through the obscure distance and splashed upon another hunter stumbling along a lonely pond, water of life, water of lust and love, bounded by dark fauna, darker stone. Though he tried his best to capture love, to capture and consecrate love, beasts roamed the wilderness, their blessings or burdens suspended in snared breath. Night, too, withheld its screams. Something more was expected to stir the air. He sat at pond's edge still as a moon-moth sniffing the blind air, faint light loose around his hands. The breeze that moaned in pine trees and lapped bright jewels of water on shored rocks died in his seiney arms. ii. For lost love he stayed with the night silence of water without even a whisper of her beauty, of her voice fading like the angels of childhood, and he choked on the depth of an unsounded lump in the throat, the moonless agitation attending the lost granite gripping the shoreline, its knowledge of day forgotten in fallen height, as rock preached to them its cold sermon so that now, at last, under dimmed clouds, in the mirrored blue-blackness, with love a dying flame, the difference between stone and water and flesh resolved in black similitude. iii. Her ghost slipped from his side, willow-thin, wispy as exhaled air, and he tried to breathe her in, hold her like a word along the bronchial cilla, but she began to dance across the dark water in ritual delight, danced beyond the shore-hemmed soul abandoned to marry blackness, danced beyond the teasing reach of anything human, so that the joining of myth and man, like cloud and sky, field and flower, grape and vine, the blessed binding into one new creature shuddered, faltered as spokes shattering within the wheel, its sonorous repetition imploding in failed rhythm, in the music and dance that loses at first its sweetness before vinegar splatters against the heart. Such was that dance: lovely and chilly, excitement and delusion. iv. A bullfrog cracked the deep still to proclaim the hour was its. Pine boughs mourned their containment. Crickets applauded from every sudden where. She sang or hummed, he couldn't tell, but he knew deep in marrow that harmony-more superior than dream, with a promise as full as white and purple lavender swaying, purity and blood, completing the sweet air of imagined spring, and the song sluiced the black from out the air so that a thrill of stars shone in her eyes while waves glowed with rippled tears across his cheeks, a pink suggestion fading into the vanishing point of night's heavy canvas stretched across the nightmare kept hidden until the final, awful truth clicked with dream and hope's evaporation v. He rose from the tree-shouldered shore, an Orion loosened from the elliptic, roused, almost gladdened, and primed, but without new challenge. He reached out to her withs hands of vapor, fingers a mist of nothing, less than air, the bread of his heart disassembling in the dismal water. Some fish, twitching with instinct, some opportunistic bass that only acknowledges hunger in pantheonless existence, splashed skyward to feed, its mouth drooling night's urgency as it swallowed a moth like an angel. He stood in the joyless air and claimed as legacy this moment, this mountain of sorrow that neither wind nor rain nor ice could weather or reduce to the dust gelling in his veins and spreading like false light. And when the moon rose at last, when it finally blossomed into consciousness, it thrashed the diluted weight of its shining against horizons without mercy for granite or passion. 5. IN THE CELLAR I'm standing in the cellar, the only place I smoke inside the house, a book in one hand, the other flicking ash into the empty pickle jar that serves as ashtray atop a simple table of boards and sawhorse along with the miterbox, an unopened package of wood shims, and an old news magazine folded over on an article about how to fix the war in Iraq, a bare lightbulb overhead, its pull-string dangling by my shoulder like some lesson in planetary physics, body magnetism, or the powerlessness of words, while exhaled smoke invades cobwebs in the floor joists above me, some Southern Pine, still blond, well dried, aligned in sturdy formation that pleases something vague in us. Did I mention it's almost midnight and I've just come out of the bath and stand naked in a basement, putting out my cigarette and closing a book of poems? 6. THE EYELASH On your pillow, an eyelash, a thin curve of you lost in sleep, in dream. This little hair a secret sign between us that says I give you more than bed and body, more than heart and eyes. I give you love's magic that casts a spell to make the years disappear. I put your eyelash in my shirt pocket, close to the heart, and make breakfast, cinnamon bread French toast, heated maple syrup, the way you love. 7. WAITING FOR THE WIND I have been the young soldier trembling in the darkness of the gutted earth, waiting for the wind to subside, waiting to kneel and pray. But the wind has scattered the gods among the galaxies. In the near distance an explosion, a jet in afterburn. Night grows and turns, it wants to heave up everything and begin again. But it's not that easy. There is silence as a hawk circles a field. When it flies off, small songs fill the air. But not tonight. Whimpers fall to the bloodied ground. In the morning spent shells smell everywhere. 8. WINGS I step into night air, dripping from the August bath. I stretch knotted muscles, extend my hands toward Cassiopeia, then bow with knee kissing damp grass. When I stand up, the slim breeze slowly dries. Then I hear the moon chiming in the oak tree like tin hearts on a string. The moon glazes me with light. Moths blossom from out the dark; they converge on me, their pale wings fanning my pale body as if to say: Lift your wings. | |
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