Artifact
Blood red ivy fringes the handles
of my latest amphora not yet glazed
Dried-up stream of dirt-scrubbed clues
crosshatchings chipped pigment
bones that appear always to have been
broken into inaudible shards
I forget myself
so easily forget that here in the gullies
where stars long since exploded
once buried their light I too
had somewhere to be only a moment ago
descending the beveled hills
toward the temple rubble
My robes felt fresh and new
washed only once at the river
when annoyed about my reputation
I scribbled on the tavern wall
Varus dreams of nothing but jugs of wine
and Cupid’s arrow forgive me
if I should ever desire another
betrayed the lover who’d had no reason
not to trust me
Only last evening
dozing alone under some small-time
Vesuvius I imagined my villa
overrun with olive groves a white ocean
murmuring at my ear Poised at the wheel
I hardly noticed my own presence
until too late I snapped awake
under a low ceiling hands puzzling
lifetimes later over the wet
clay of a vessel left unfinished
Transients
Two breezes blow into a bar
The first one asks the second
What’s it like
to die a natural death?
Strafing the countertops
by the windows’ red moons
the bartender orders
a dry martini
and a clear conscience
Soon everyone orders one
till all of history
strolls in through the back
tsk-tsk’ing The last guy
to order that
ended up dead
I think it was one of the recent
Caesars yes and he was
wandering around
freer than I’d ever seen him
History Moves in Waves
Lou Costello searches his pockets
and finds he’s fallen out of love
The ocean feels harder to follow now
drifting in browns and grays
the way each decade’s fashions
stray from the last
Television flecks
in light-green coin shapes
pale and glitter through Hollywood fog
The ocean is its own specimen
and Lou Costello his own
Laughter piles up in the colors below
which he still cannot understand
So he stops paying close attention
A History of Art
There is Christ’s birth there is Christ’s death
a few sedatives in between
Eventually an architectural
annunciation beam (a bluebird flaps overhead)
and the voices of everyone
who slightly irritates me
Emanation
1
Wrapped in bedclothes a lord flees his rooms Churches closed no priest to be had He runs to inscribe his own name among the register of deaths Only a week since boils broke out on his son whom he did not tend The corpse lay like an anchor in the house till a stranger was paid to cart it away Garden vineyard gold without end No longer a future but a constant refrain this one dying that one dead Where best to expire field bushes some nearby road? The town grows a heart of innumerable wolves
2
Lizard ill with leaves of wild lettuce
Water without danger without wine
Emerald placed on the tongue
The melodious mind should avoid
running jumping jealousy
anger Neither drunk nor yet too sober
Bells are rung cannon discharged
a house rubbed down with handkerchiefs
Webs everywhere air in motion
Serenity to wash with urine
strained through a cloth
Maddest of all the stinking billy goats
No man should think of death
3
The most beautiful girls
have abandoned all pretensions
scurrying like shadows in search of food
Fathers’ children leave to die
children from their parents fly
The fortunate dragged
to a field and burnt
others gnawed by dogs
Minor friars overcome
remain in the rooms of the dying
Some live soberly others singing
That no sick body should be near
Rushed to the graves to bury themselves
Or carried away not quite dead
merged blood red to yellow
Was that not sad and painful to relate
I died with thirteen of my house on that same date?
4
Crawling down among the dead long upon a heap of corpses
Fruit is slight money mute Oh let us lie hard
Read to us in the upper orchard as the number of priests
decreases
and old linen envelops the Lamb a thousandfold submissive
Ripe grapes truly I would tear thee to pieces
Having said this in morning remains by afternoon
5
Poisonous stars wander the sky
till historians fall off as rags and the dead
are no longer counted
Dogs go mad circling the hospitals in pairs
A metal statue speaks a rain of snakes descends
Blind threads please protect the doors
of those not yet infected
Failure of first origin inorganic air
developing on the lips of the dead
Thought itself turns to vinegar
The soil a wash of cesspool and scarf
Cloaks travel bags trunks
A swine is born of a lamb A goat of a horse
Too few vultures for the cartfuls of nobles
6
Plaster the wounds no longer announcing
What news the couriers bring
jeweled halls costly furniture esteem of men
Young man pursue pursue
Alight ostentatious on the system of castes
Imperial markets recede into marsh
Quick before parsons abate
go wed the wild bird
7
New behaviors neither rain nor snow can touch
Dancers dance holes which reach the waist
The heavens open pathological
Too bold too hard the unexpected harmonies
marriages so numerous
Men begin to make new clothes
Considerable scandal the full-fledged dandy
Cushions under the head still stained with tears
Water pure and clear as any ever issued
Light spreads over the roadsides
He who had pretended to be dead
pops up out of the cart
Men on the Road
Men on the road have got some stories
They’ve seen Achilles in flip-flops
drifting from room to rented room
still vaguely fleeing Poseidon
along the muted Western frontier
Men on the road don’t talk a lot but when they do
they tell you tales of lion skins and missile husks
strewn across their native fields
stray shells too held on to as reminders
Men on the road go sliding their hands
down shorts of adolescent
boys whose wealthy fathers
they’ve known for years or met
that night at the bar They ask them what they
think it means and how it touch
es
their sense of spiritual identity
I met a man on the road
once and said take your hand away
then said it again and he did and soon was gone
but I felt regretful later deeply doubtful
Men on the road sense absences
rope-soled shoes boosted from trail guides
exactly perpendicular
with the edge of the motel carpet
as flecks of their own dried skin
collect Train car still to be ridden
home on ties not quite yet laid
each day’s dust floats back through unlit air
where men on the road overhear
the occasional couple conversing across the hall
Clubfeet is all that’s audible
above the gentle TV static a woman’s voice
like a mother’s or a nurse’s
and a man’s accompanying noises
Men on the road plan their own funerals
imagining music and streams of weeping ephebes
weeping not for death but for what was
acted upon them once by the corpse
and for the similar urges now straining within
Out on a hillside (the voices pool
freer and freer) someone’s kid
was born with clubfeet
Acknowledgments
AGNI: “Goshen,” “Second Goshen”
Barrow Street: “Ode on Quote How to Live,” “Retreat”
Boulevard: “Endurance”
Connotation Press: “Circumstances,” “Ruins,” “Men on the Road,”
“Villa View Drive”
The Cortland Review: “Anamnesis”
Court Green and Poetry Daily: “A History of Art”
Hayden’s Ferry Review: “History Moves in Waves”
Literary Imagination: “Restoration”
New Orleans Review: “East” (published as “from East”)
The New Yorker: “Riposte to Ode”
Parnassus: “Out at the Mall”
Plume: “Listen Up Medusa,” “Personal Narrative”
Sonora Review: “Frame”
The Threepenny Review: “Artifact”
West Branch: “West” (published as “Family IV”)
Witness: “Emanation,” sections 2, 3, 4, 6 (published as “Emanation,
I–V”)
Thank you to my mother, my father, and my sister.
Thank you to Kesselfam and to Vincent.
Thank you, Tamara.
Thank you to Kitt, Krishan, Albert, and Dennis.
Thank you to Timothy Liu, Major Jackson, April Bernard, and
Amy Gerstler.
Thank you to Patricia Dunn, Lynette Creasy, Sarah Wallace, and
Alfred Turco.
Thank you to Sarah Gorham, Kristen Radtke, and Ariel Lewiton.
Credit: Tamara Arellano
Michael Homolka’s poems have appeared in publications such as Antioch Review, Boulevard, The New Yorker, Parnassus, Ploughshares, and The Threepenny Review. A graduate of Bennington College’s MFA program, he lives and works in New York City.
The Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry
2014
Jordan Zandi, Solarium
Selected by Henri Cole
2013
Sean Bishop, The Night We’re Not Sleeping In
Selected by Susan Mitchell
2012
Trey Moody, Thought That Nature
Selected by Cole Swensen
2011
Lauren Shapiro, Easy Math
Selected by Marie Howe
2010
David Hernandez, Hoodwinked
Selected by Amy Gerstler
2009
Julia Story, Post Moxie
Selected by Dan Chiasson
2008
Karyna McGlynn, I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl
Selected by Lynn Emanuel
2007
Monica Ferrell, Beasts for the Chase
Selected by Jane Hirshfield
2006
Gabriel Fried, Making the New Lamb Take
Selected by Michael Ryan
2005
Matthew Lippman, The New Year of Yellow
Selected by Tony Hoagland
2004
Simone Muench, Lampblack & Ash
Selected by Carol Muske-Dukes
2003
Karen An-hwei Lee, In Medias Res
Selected by Heather McHugh
2002
Carrie St. George Comer, The Unrequited
Selected by Stephen Dunn
2001
Rick Barot, The Darker Fall
Selected by Stanley Plumly
2000
Cate Marvin, World’s Tallest Disaster
Selected by Robert Pinsky
1999
Deborah Tall, Summons
Selected by Charles Simic
1998
Aleida Rodríguez, Garden of Exile
Selected by Marilyn Hacker
1997
James Kimbrell, The Gatehouse Heaven
Selected by Charles Wright
1996
Baron Wormser, When
Selected by Alice Fulton
1995
Jane Mead, The Lord and the General Din of the World
Selected by Philip Levine
Sarabande Books is a nonprofit literary press located in Louisville, KY, and Brooklyn, NY. Founded in 1994 to champion poetry, short fiction, and essay, we are committed to creating lasting editions that honor exceptional writing. For more information, please visit sarabandebooks.org.
Antiquity Page 3