Antiquity
Page 1
Antiquity
Copyright © 2016 Michael Homolka
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Homolka, Michael.
[Poems. Selections]
Antiquity: poems / by Michael Homolka. — First edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-941411-27-8 (pbk.: acid-free paper)
I. Title.
PS3608.O494436A6 2015
811'.6—dc23
2015027060
Cover design and interior by Kristen Radtke.
Cover image by Brian Powers.
Manufactured in Canada.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Sarabande Books is a nonprofit literary organization.
This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
The Kentucky Arts Council, the state arts agency, supports Sarabande Books with state tax dollars and federal funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.
for PAJ
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction by Mary Ruefle
1
Goshen
Second Goshen
Third Goshen
Fourth Goshen
Fifth Goshen
Sixth Goshen
Seventh Goshen
Ode on Quote How to Live
Antiquity
Anamnesis
Circumstances
Retreat
2
Out at the Mall
Listen Up Medusa
Riposte to Ode
Personal Narrative
Broken Home
Endurance
Frame
Phenomenon
Restoration
Unjustified Mood on a Monday Evening
3
Ruins
Modern Sensibility
East
Villa View Drive
West
Artifact
Transients
History Moves in Waves
A History of Art
Emanation
Men on the Road
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Introduction
The book you are holding in your hands is called Antiquity, and it’s filled with poems as new as April crocuses. Or as old as April crocuses, for as John Berger points out, if poetry sometimes speaks of its own immortality, it has nothing to do with individual genius, but with the fact that poetry “abandons itself to language, in the belief that language embraces all experience, past, present, and future.” The poems in Antiquity very much abandon themselves to language, to the collective poetic endeavor, and they do so in a rich, textured, and sustained voice, though out of a self that is “flexible in its adherence / to a particular time period.” Hence a poem set at the mall but written after Martial, hence “Napoleon off / at boarding school,” hence “Listen Up Medusa,” hence “He who had pretended to be dead / pops up out of the cart.” Like a crocus, we could say. What’s antiquity anyway but a thing that is always lurking beneath the surface, not only in the sense of its influence—then shaping now—but in the sense our now will so soon be a then.
And so: could be Goshen, land of the Israelites, could be Goshen, New Jersey. We have our floods, our epidemics, our wars. “Each of us seems convinced he is the sole member of the family running home from the battle at Marathon bearing / good news We have fought bravely and survived.” Of course no one survives, but the book’s subjects—history, paintings, language—are things that have survived thus far, to the extent we are tempted to ask a question: History, paintings, language, what else is there? Personal experience, that constantly decaying thing? Homolka addresses the question, slyly eschewing experience in more than one poem, slyly hanging onto it in others. Nonetheless, the experience of the reader cannot be denied—if we read at all it is to have an experience—even if that experience is no more (or no less, depending on your view) than to catch the light and “sit and discuss / the reflections.” And what if this book, by virtue of its intelligence and in spite of its exhilaration, leaves us with a sense of spiritual weariness; what if the book leaves us wanting to be gladder and more puffed up? Consider most of all that if such wishes were granted, we wouldn’t have these marvelous poems, poems that remind us how easy it is, really, to talk to Horace.
—Mary Ruefle, 2015
1
Goshen
Everywhere in heaven’s meadows
Aryans jack each other off
under the willows
breezily
The year Jews’ permits are collected
words of consolation
sprinkle like seed
across their bellies
Over the leafy coastlines of southern
Berlin purest oxygen
slathers the air in
suntan lotion
The destitute teethe at fatigues of cadets
launching themselves toward
some more inward
six day war
While out of the backs of chariots
emaciated lovers receive star
after star after
star
Second Goshen
They’re really going
to kill us all It bears repeating
inferences trickling
in little by little like aphids
I would have to have known history
not been so close to it
I couldn’t make sense of it
where unmatched scrubs
lie draped across the barracks
bunks like forest markers
fate meanwhile continuing
its innocuous silence
They can murder us each
only once It bears repeating
so many believing till the last
moment we’d be spared
Praise God O
Praise God you can hear
spoken again and again
from the hedges and viburnum
Third Goshen
Bright orange koi
in ponds ringing paradise
The Aryan gentleman
promises me things
Wearing a tulip
behind his ear
wagging his petit
black-and-white
buttocks Betty Boop
style regales me
with such as islands
for tumbling
thickets for splaying
barrels and waterfalls
for starting afresh
all the richness
of life’s vicissitudes
I take his glosses
at face value convinced
he just wants
the best for me
and my family
who gave their
oils and corals
moss manna and soil alike
up for the future
But he falls instead
to swimming with
bright orange koi
by ivy-latticed
lawns of the homeland
weaving his Goldilocks
curls with mint
swaying suggestively
in a light sarong
Simple to see
the creatures in whom
he meant to inspire
kinship only
swim on unmoved
I love the koi
I thought I loved
him but no
to the koi and koi
alone I feel loyal
Their loose glow
captures the closeness
the family once felt
stories till late
each of us cast
; as saviors draped
in loofahs and
minks O Clark
Gable O Pavlova
They see me
waking with aught
but cinders for a heart
as our Aryan lovely
assures he can save
us but flays my mother
and father instead
styling their remains
into potpourri
frisées as I look
on and allow it
residing as he does
in the calmest of camps
prisoner yes
but bright orange koi
swishing his long
tail among beautiful pearls
Fourth Goshen
Coiled around the family’s neck
Himmler’s intestines
comfort and protect us
our promiscuous spirits
swarming his passageways
unromantic amino-esque
The hero sings maidenly
songs in the fields as he reaps
and some mountains drift past
All his uncles waste away
in paradise’s black caverns
wavering over the dining room table
each of them eighty
hair cropped short cooing
monkey see monkey do
to adolescent selves
Look at their organs
pirouette through the air
free with Himmler’s
mingling among amethyst
bracelets of self-preservation
Our half meanwhile
enjoys each other’s torsos best
and undulates in simple spirals
out across the soul’s gray bags
We watch our psyches’ enzymes
all grow glum with time
we squint to discern
how the rules might
change again postwar
Fifth Goshen
Our enemy meditates on its bottle gourd tree
As atolls tremble each removes
his burlap scarf takes the unguent at hand
(Vaseline of ancestors the wind has spit up
toward thunderclouds and tidal waves) and smears
it across his eyelids and genitals
the uterus too
since that’s the region our enemy wanders most
vexed vast and alone
horizon-high stalks turning the blood to gas
Sixth Goshen
We see what we did was wrong
because we’re being punished
specifically because of that
but still we under-
stand and feel remorse
Give the Hälftlings
back their wives from the amber
whose forced inching
never quite leaves the nerves
We enjoyed
doing as we did entrapping
their prophets in swamps
first up to the ankles
then up to the neck
releasing crested eagles into the air
as augurs for saviors
and then not saving them
Such pastoral settings we offered
that much to our credit
such unsung serenity
Seventh Goshen
Our enemy ponders upward of eons
the nature of those trees
that were to be their inheritance
Forest and desert rise up from the scalp
as their men still drift perplexed
releasing victims
out of a sense of obligation
The limpid evening swells with spores
The Aryans are afoot the silence
is freeing Look
crusts of stars no longer horny
or restless to conceive
Ode on Quote How to Live
Experience counts for something
I feel it sickly around me and disappointing
none of its images quite adding up
Better to stand off to the side
for now of all familiar voices
get rid of the idioms and inhabit
whatever dilating silence
makes itself most prominent
given the right dark trees
the right foreign towns
for dead textbooks with erasable smileys
on smudged pages’ edges
to rest right up against my misgivings
The specificity of our historical
moment fails to offer any
of the anticipated breadth of feeling
Or just our symbols are failing
all this surplus aloneness
in the face of times less lucid than our own
Exhausted all day I fall short of fully living
and maintain only the stigmas
Experience matters I know
or whatever experience stands for
I can’t write off the gamey
smell of events with their relentless
literalness and casual qualities
moments of blankness dropping off daily
and no one’s heart quite in it
Antiquity
Follow me imprinted upon walkway sand
by a beautiful espadrilled boy
red lipped high waisted
patting at his perfumed wig
each limb in motion
though as a whole motionless
The day’s intelligentsia
attempt to sense-check
his prepubescent meandering
who has never heard
lustful used in quite this way
Along the workerish district Follow me
pillared and redly lit before morning
though some who study
the markings still think sacrosanct
The lateness of the hour
laurels itself Pity the benighted
all our lineated clarities
and able to stomach so little
no not much for fuzzy territory we
Anamnesis
My final self fluttered once
that version which isn’t
waiting for anything
and flexible in its adherence
to a particular time period
I was napping alone
in summer noon whatever
century the daylight resembled
when the world of allegory
and metaphor let fall
tiny Roman statuettes
onto my bony intestines
So sprouted other
inwardnesses more manifold
more true debatably
and more mournful too
I felt made of marble
I felt gods in my blood
It was like there was nothing
wherever I’d lived before
Circumstances
A stone drops constantly
down through my sternum
down toward its spiritual
basin of granite
or toward my having
overworked myself
and one day waking up dead
(much to the stone’s advantage?)
The stone has got to be aware
because it whistles so
loud down its well toward my
self-centric heart I can’t
consider anything
other than the stone
It’s a stone in my chest and it hurts
like a sunburnt beach
or a mayfly glubbing through sap
Most charming of all
like anything which harms
anything else there isn’t
a reason in sight
Retreat
Everyone here feels sorry
for everyone else
having wandered
Königsberg bridges alone
and determined our lives
conspicuously tiny
Second week by a bare bulb
&nb
sp; as far back as possible
away from the balcony
the same blue stain gives way
to each of our inward
game reserves
where snow dogs come out
unnoticed the same
hour every evening
As for the central statue
no one understands
quite how to walk around it