The ancient Forum Romanum: a miracle of marble!
Columns Ionian and Corinthian and statues of gods
And consuls, temples lined inside and out with marble
And mosaic and tiles. Now ruins. Used for centuries
As a quarry to be mined by Bishops and Popes
To beautify their Christian temples that sit on the ground
Of once proud basilicas and temples dedicated to
The many, not the one deity. The Pantheon a temple to
All the gods and goddesses. Now one of the many churches
Named for Mary and the statues of deities replaced
By saints. Peter for Pan. Dominic for Apollo, and Maria
Grazie Plena for Roma or every goddess ever prayed to
In the vast empire of once accepted worship: Isis, Inanna,
Hathor. The outside once was covered with marble. Two or
Three pieces still exist. Holes like those on the Coliseum
Walls show where the marble was affixed, then ripped off.
Who then is left to make just reparation to the ancient gods?
Lay me down in cool salt water.
Lay me down like Noah’s daughter.
Lay me down and tell me you miss me.
Lay me down when I’m dead, and kiss me.
In the non-Catholic cemetery in Rome
Close by the pyramid of Cestius
The bones of John Keats lay down in cool
Earth. His words were not writ on water
As it says on his stone, his last request.
Green leaves of ground-cover fill the grave :–
This now resurgent life of his remains. But his
Real remains are writ upon the winds of eternity
Sung over and over lo these last two hundred years
And will be as long as English poetry is remembered.
A small gray cat circles my calves and lays
Him down by Keats’ grave. These cats, some say,
Are the ghosts of those buried here, and they
Lay upon the stones and plots as if protecting them
From daemons who would steal their souls or
Their legacies. This gray stays. Is protective.
Abides like all-abiding Death. Makes his bed now
Upon the tripod’s canvas case as I recite for camera
And for “the darkling” the great Ode to a Nightingale
And caress with my finger tips the green grass
Of Keats’ hair as my tears water the soil of his long-
Gone longing for death and the bliss of final solitude.
Vincenzo Viviani and Giovanni Battista
de Nelli strove to save Galileo’s legacy :
Viviani keeping all of his master’s papers
in a huge closet along one wall
of his house in Florence
rewriting many letters
excising references to Copernicus
and blasphemous heliocentricity.
When he died his nephew inherited the house
and kept the papers, but when he died,
his nephew dumped them all into a bin
to make room for his linen bedclothes
and sold them off in bundles
to merchants for wrapping paper:
gravitational theory to take home sugar,
parabolic arcs of projectiles for some pecorino.
In 1750 Nelli bought some mortadella
from a local butcher for a picnic,
and when he unwrapped it, he found
a paper in Galileo’s handwriting
which he recognized on the spot.
He rushed back to the shop,
bought up the entire lot,
and spent the remaining years of his life
trying to put them all back together again.
The caper always goes wrong.
Some dope makes a stupid move
Like shooting the cashier or a copper
Or someone gets the shakes
And talks too much or
Someone doesn’t move at all and staring
Into the abyss he inadvertently
Screws the pooch
Or someone moves too soon and there’s no
Getaway car parked by the curb
Or maybe the dumb mutt follows
The car and the pooch screws you.
The caper always goes wrong
And someone’s got to pay the piper
Because that someone’s already
Called the tune and the tune
Has lost its melody. Doomed
And rotten you go through the motions
Knowing too well the motions all
Lead down into an empty well
And no wish is going to get you through.
Related Article: The Film Noir File: Bogie is at the top in ‘High Sierra’ by Film Noir Blonde and Mike Wilmington, filmnoirblonde.com
“In 1941, the same year he played Sam Spade, private eye, one of the greatest of all movie detectives, in John Huston’s classic film noir “The Maltese Falcon,” Humphrey Bogart also played one of the greatest of all movie gangsters, Roy Earle, in Raoul Walsh‘s classic noir, “High Sierra.” If Spade was one of the meanest, most realistic and most unsympathetic of all movie detectives (up until then), Earle was one of the roughest, least clichéd but most surprisingly sympathetic gangsters. He’s a hard guy with a soft streak, whose sentimentality (especially toward women and little dogs), may trip him up in the end.”
The skin that hangs from this skeleton
is cloud stuff: tree limbs on a hilltop
seen from a moving vehicle – ineluctable
like foxfire in nightwind, vanishing within
seconds after sight. The tegument between
these bones feels right; tightened to keep
me strung high and low (cap a pe) from waist
to crown to toe and then below all things
connective like my lord’s puppet all unstrung.
Femurs found in a dig in Egypt; metatarsals un-
covered beneath centuries of dust in Mesopotamia
and parts of a skull in a helmet in a river in England:
all these things were once living and breathing:
creation’s transitive explosion of love
and here I still am in the middle of it all alive
and wondering how it all will end. The thigh
bone connected to the hip bone, the hip bone
connected to the love bone now hear the word
of the Lord. Or is it Darwin? Why must we
choose as if from a menu of entrees in the
bistro of history? Garden of Eden or Olduvai Gorge?
Cain and Abel or Australopithecus africanus?
Noah or Homo Erectus? Revelation or walking fish?
Which? Or both, or none? Can anyone judge
or even begin to care? Too many questions
without enough answers. This is the way it
always must be. I can feel it in my bones:
all two hundred and six of them rattling around
in a cage of flesh – bone house, brain house, sea road
of muscle and fat waving us on into infinity’s mystery.
