Poem
Listen, Lesbia!
Surely you can hear.
Shake off that silly hangover
while I part the curtains
just slightly.
Our landlord’s man has let us off this time,
We’re not expelled.
Victorians liked their mortar made with lime,
Our walls have held.
The Shorter Poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus by Gaius Valerius Catullus, translated by A.D. Hope
Hooded eyes, eyelashes thinning, she tailgates a semi,
keeping up with him in case she breaks down.
The truckie has her measure in his rear-view mirror –
In the beginning he’d herd people
clocking up the hours in apartments
above and below him but they heard sink
and shower sounds and turned on washing
machines that spurted later while he was
on the job he’d reconsider part one of
his partner’s apparent lack of funding
proposal paperwork a black mark
To touch death in this manner: if our fingertips could pierce
that airless element, the body
breathing calm within its envelope of gas …
Morning took me to the jetty.
I saw the moon jellyfish pulse toward the air:
as their edges broke that barrier, the briefest spark appeared.
In the clear light of a cloudy summer morning
The idiot boy, holding his father’s hand,
Comes by me on the Quay where I sit writing.
His father spots me looking up, and I don’t want
To look as if I wished I hadn’t, so
Instead of turning straight back to my books
I look around, thus making it a general thing
That I do every so often –
To watch the ferries, to check out the crowd.