carrying just such an awful head.
At the Café Door
Something someone said nearby
made me turn to the cafe door
and I saw that beautiful body
like one Love made as his finest try.
In joy he shaped those balanced limbs
exalted the sculptured height
shaped the face in devotion
and left his own impression
by touch of hand at brow, lips, and eyes.
He Swears
He swears now and then to start a better life.
But whenever night comes with its own advice
compromises and promises
but when night comes with its own power
over a body that wants and searches, then
lost, to the same fateful joy, he goes again.
One Night
The bedroom was cheap, vulgar
secret over a dubious bar.
From the window you’d see the alley
dirty and narrow.
Some working-hands’ voices
came up from below.
They were playing cards
and having a party.
There in that common, low-class bed
I had love’s body, I had the lips
voluptuous and rosy red of drunken rapture
rosy red of such a drunken rapture
that now as I write—after so many years—
in my house by myself
I am drunk with rapture again.
Morning Sea
Let me stand and let me look for a little at nature
morning sea and cloudless sky
bright violet-blue and lemon banks
beautiful all and grandly lit.
Let me stand here and let me fool myself that I see them
(I did for a second really when first I took my stand)
and not here too my fantasies
my recollections, the images of pleasure.
Painted
I pay attention to my work. I love it.
but composition is slow today.
It takes the heart out of me.
The day has had its effect:
it is getting darker and darker
it is blowing and it is raining.
I really want to look more than to tell.
In this painting now I look at
a handsome boy stretched out
for a nap near a spring
tired out from running.
What a handsome lad!
What a god-descended noontime
took him now to put him to sleep!
A long time I sit and look just so.
Then back at my art again
I am resting from its toil.
Orophernes
This man on the tetradrachm looks
as though there’s a smile on his face
a beautiful face that, and fine,
he is Orophernes, son of Ariarathes.
Chased when a boy out of Cappadocia,
out of the grand ancestral palace,
sent to grow up in Ionia,
and be forgotten among strangers .
Ah, wondrous nights of Ionia
where without fear he came to know
all about pleasure, and Greek throughout,
in his heart always Asian,
but in manner and talk, a Greek,
adorned with turquoises, Greek in dress,
body fragrant with jasmine scent;
and of the fair young men of Ionia
he the fairest, closest to ideal.
Afterwards, when the Syrians came
into Cappadocia and made him king,
he rushed upon kingship
to find a new enjoyment every day,
to grab and gather gold and silver,
and cheerfully brag
seeing piled up riches glisten.
As for concern for the place, for administration,
he did not know what was happening around him.
The Cappadocians soon removed him
and he went into exile to Syria, in the palace
of Demetrius to idle and play.
Yet one day unaccustomed reflections
cut short his long idleness.
He remembered that by his mother, Antiochis,
and by that ancient Stratonice
he descended from Syria’s crown,
and was a Seleucid almost.
Briefly he left off whoring and drinking
ineptly, confusedly looked for a plot,
something to do, something to plan,
Somewhere his end must have been written and lost
or maybe history had to pass it by,
rightly did not condescend
to signalize so meaningless a matter.
This man on the tetradrachm
left us the charm of his lovely youth,
the light from his poetic beauty,
a visible memento of a boy of Ionia,
he is Orophernes, son of Ariarathes.
The Battle of Magnesia
He’d lost his old push, his verve,
his tired body sick almost
would chiefly get his care
and the rest of his life
he’d live unconcerned.
This does Philip project at least.
Tonight he plays dice,
has an appetite for fun:
Set the table with bunches of roses.
So at Magnesia Antiochos is undone:
utter destruction fell, they say,
on the troops of his splendid host.
They might have inflated it. It might not all be true.
If only. They were, while enemies, family.
Still it’s enough, a single “if only”
Could even be too much.
Philip—to be sure—will not put off his feast
however tired from life he is.
One good thing he keeps: his memory does not fail.
He remembers how in Syria
they made their lamentations
the kind of sorrow they had
when mother Macedonia turned ino sweepings.
Now to dinner. Slaves! The flute players, lots of lights.
Manuel Komnenos
Lord King Manuel Komnenos
one melancholy September day
felt death near. The astrologers
(paid) of the court babbled
many more years would he live;
but while they are talking he
remembers old customary pieties
orders from the monastery cells
ecclesiastical garments to wear
and wears them and happily displays
the modest look of priest or monk.
Happy all who believe
and like Lord King Manuel end
dressed most simply in their belief.
The Seleucid’s Displeasure
The Seleucid Demetrios was not pleased
to hear that a Ptolemy had arrived
in Italy in such poor shape:
with three or four slaves only,
wearing poor man’s clothes . . . on foot.
That way now their families will be
at Rome a mock, a laughing-stock.
That at bottom they’d become
a kind of serving staff to the Romans
the Seleucid knows. That they give
them their thrones without consultation
and take them away as they like,
he knows. But for looks at least,
they might preserve some dignity,
not to forget that they are still kings
still—alas—called kings.
For this the Seleucid Demetrios was upset
and offered Ptolemy right off
scarlet raiment, a shiny crown, precious jewels,
many servants and attendants,
his most expensive horses
; for Ptolemy to present himself at Rome
as he ought, a Greek monarch
of Alexander’s line.
But the Lagid had come to beg.
He knew his job and said No to all:
he had no use for these fineries.
Dressed in old clothes, he humbly entered Rome
put up at the house of a lowly worker
and then presented himself to the Senate
wretched and poor in order thereby to secure
as beggar a better outcome.
When They Stir
Try to keep them, poet,
even though few, the ones that pause
your visions of making love.
Set them half-hidden in your phrases.
Try to hold on to them, poet,
when they stir in your mind
at night or in the blaze of noon.
On the Street
His appealing face, a little pale,
his brown eyes, as though tired,
twenty-five years old, but more like twenty,
something of the artist in his dress—
the shade of his foulard, the shape of his collar—
he walks aimlessly on the street
as though hypnotized still by illicit pleasure,
Before the Statue of Endymion
On a white chariot drawn by four mules
perfectly white, and decked in silver
I come from Miletos to Latmos
celebrating rites—oblation and sacrifice—
to Endymion. I sailed from Alexandria
in a purple trireme.
Here is the statue,
and I in ecstasy now behold
Endymion’s famous beauty.
My slaves empty baskets of jasmine
and auspicious acclamations
rouse pleasure from ancient times.
In Osroene’s City
From a fight in the tavern
they brought us my friend
Remon hurt
yesterday near midnight.
The moon lit up on the bed
through windows we left
wide-open
his wonderful body.
We are a mix here
Syrian, Greek, Armenian, Mede
and so is Remon.
But yesterday we thought
when the moon lit up
his lovely face
of Plato’s Charmides.
Passage
What images he timidly imagined as a student
they are out in the open now.
He loafs about, stays up all night,
and gets led astray. And as it is
(for our Art) it is right. Sensual pleasure
delights in his blood, young and hot.
A rapture of outlaw love conquers his body;
his youthful limbs surrender to that love.
Just so does a simple boy earn our due regard,
and even passes suddenly
to the High World of Poetry,
the sensuous boy with blood young and hot.
For Ammones Who Died, Age 29, in 610
Raphael, a few lines please,
an epitaph for Ammones the poet,
something of exquisite sensibility
and smooth. You can do it.
You are the right one to compose
what is right for our own Ammones the poet.
Of course you will speak of his poems
but talk about his beauty too
the delicate beauty we loved.
Always your Greek has beauty and music
but now we need all your technical skill
our love and grief are passing into a foreign tongue.
Pour your Egyptian feeling into that foreign tongue.
Raphael, your lines are to be written
to hold—you know—something of our life within
where rhythm and every phrase make clear
an Alexandrian writes of an Alexandrian.
A God of Theirs
When one of Them would come to Seleucia
to the market around the evening hour,
a tall and perfectly beautiful young man
with joy in his eyes, incorruptible,
and black and perfumed hair,
the strollers would look
and one would ask another if he knew him:
was he a Greek from Syria or a stranger?
But some who were watching more closely
would understand and move aside
and while he was getting lost from sight
below the stoas in the shadows and evening lights
going to the quarter that lives only at night
with orgies and debauch and every kind
of rapture and thrill
musing, who of Them might he be?
What suspect pleasure brought him down
to the streets of Seleucia
from the Revered, All-Holy Residence?
At Evening
It would not anyhow have lasted very long
years of experience show me this.
Still, Fate was somehow in a hurry
to come and put it to an end.
But how potent were the scents.
What a wonderful bed we went to.
To what pleasure we gave our bodies.
A reminiscence of the days of pleasure
a reminiscence of the days came to me
something from our youth, us two, the heat.
I took up in my hands again a letter
and I read it over and over
until there was no light.
I went out on the balcony, sadly.
I went out to change my thoughts
by looking at least at a small part
of my beloved city, a small part
of the traffic in streets and shops.
To Pleasure
Remembering hours when
I found and had pleasure
the way I liked it
is Joy and the Scent of Life:
Joy and the Scent of Life it is
for me that I turned my back
on any sort of enjoyment
of routine modes of love.
Grey
Looking at an opal, half grey
I remember two grey eyes, good-looking
I saw some twenty years ago.
One month we were lovers, and he left—
Smyrna, I think, to work.
We never saw each other any more.
They’ll have lost their beauty
those grey eyes, if he’s alive.
The handsome face will have spoiled.
Keep them, Memory, as they were
And Memory, as much as you can
of this love of mine, as much as you can
bring me back tonight.
Iasis’ Grave
I, Iasis, lie here, of this great city,
an ephebe celebrated for beauty:
the profoundly wise admired me,
as did the simple superficial folk,
and I liked equally both.
But everybody made of me Narcissus and Hermes,
abuses used me up and killed me. Passerby,
if you are Alexandrian, you will not criticize.
You know the rush of our life . . .
what heat . . . what overwhelming sensual pleasure.
In the Month of Athyr
With trouble I read on the ancient stone
LORD JESUS CHRIST. I make out SO[U]L.
IN THE MON[TH] ATHYR
LUCIU[S] CAME [TO] REST
A mention of his age YEARS L[IV]ED
TWENTY-SEVEN shows he went young to rest.
Among obliterations HIM . . . FROM ALEXANDRIA
Thereafter three lines badly mutilated
but I get some words like PAIN. OUR T[E]ARS
and TEARS again below and GRIEF FO[R US] HIS [F]RIENDS.
Lucius, I think, wo
uld have been greatly loved.
In the month of Athyr Lucius went to his rest.
I’ve Looked So Hard
I’ve looked so hard at beauty
my eyes are full of it all:
body lines, red lips, voluptuous limbs
hair as if lifted from Greek statues
always beautiful even uncombed
falling a little over white foreheads
love’s faces as my poetry wanted them
faces in nights when I was young
faces encountered in secret on nights of my own.
Ignatius’ Tomb
Here I am not that Kleon
famous in Alexandria
(where they are hard to impress)
for my nice houses and gardens
and horses and carts
and the diamonds and silks I wore
Away with all that!
I am not that Kleon here.
Abrogate please his 28 years
I am Ignatius, a reader
who came around very late
but nevertheless just the same
I lived 10 happy months
in the peace and assurance of Christ.
Days of 1903
I never found them again—lost so fast—
the poetic eyes, the face
pale . . . at nightfall . . . on the street.
I never found them again
what I only had by chance
what I relinquished so lightly
and wanted thereafter in anguish
the eyes, poetic, the face pale
those lips, I never found them again.
The Tobacconist’s Window
By a window brightly lighted
of a smoke shop they stood
in the midst of too many people.
By chance their glances met
and told of outlaw carnal wanting
timidly, with hesitation.
Then a few nervous steps on the sidewalk
until they smiled and nodded
yes just barely.
Then the closed conveyance
the sensuous nearness of bodies
hands together, lips together.
Caesarion
Partly to fix an era in my mind