☀ Today's Poem: "Archilochus" Jesse Nathan

Woke to a wind that rose full of birdcall
dropping it fresh as if drawn from a well.
Starlings mobbing elms like a creek talking.
Farmhouse window rattling lightly. My eyes
find my desk: notes and lists, tasks and numbers
interbedded with books stacked — like the beams
that used to be a soaphouse, now mythic
behind the barn — in dust, cord, silverfish
growing over clear intention. Love, I
woke to the wind that rose up full of birds
and for a second didn’t know my name.
Woke with a tickle of panic, haunted
but not sure why. A thirsting to have
my sensibility immersed, drawn through
an othering element, though I think
he’s a wretch. My job today is to dig
to put in a few posts, put in a fence,
and as I stab and sink my narrow spade
through turf and root and worm and sticky clay,
I’m thinking of boundaries, I’m thinking him
hooligan, scamp, soldier. Skilled at singing.

He traded cow for lyre. Joined an army
to feel sober, fatal. And in buskins
fought among medlars, where the wine waves lisp
Aegean sand lining the isle Thasos,
where marble quarries ziggurat down.
Lived by the ash-spear, liked screwing like war.
Seam of the scrotum, he sang. Wick rubbed raw.
Iamb a weapon. Myrtle, soft horn, grape.
One fragment reads simply, rhinoceros.
When his promised’s father called it off,
he seduced her young sister in a poem
and came on her crotch in the last tercet.
Kept living by the promptings of his sex.
Said need is a limb-loosener. And then
of his poems crowed, There’s virtue in the feet!
His were silenced by an acquaintance, Crow.
It was an all-out fight, we don’t know why
Crow slashed him groin to throat, left him to rats.

His mom had been enslaved. His highborn dad
a founding father of a frontier town,
island spired with pines and arching from the sea
like an ass’s backbone. He thought friends hurt
the most. That we were surely promised light.
That change is birth: metamorph, term of art
for stone’s reception to — without melting —
great stress. In the fall heat, I plant these posts
till lunchtime. Sandwich of apple, turkey
sliced sheer as cheesecloth, on buttered wholegrain.
I hear George, my cabbie once in Athens:
Sure it’s nice here, unless you want to leave.

Hypocrite. Greek for actor, answerer,
interpreter. When you read these drafts, love,
you frown. Say so much anger in your lines.
Anger? Is that it? With marble tongues and teeth
he’d adorned his escutcheon of wood,
it nictated in sunlight like sunlit seas —
I’m thinking of our work and what it means:
A fence may be a seam, or seem a bridge,
both are gestures in the air. This, a shield
so the dogs don’t muck in the septic soup,
to separate what’s slough from what runs free —
that’s what I think I’m up to here? Maybe.

(Initiatory lust, remember when
you brought me here, nudged me down on bracken,
toiled on me like on a straw, gnats fussing ...
A pleasure went out through me like a gale
though pleasure is much too shallow a word
for what roils me like ribbons in a wind.
Some law, some ageless vise, had grip of me
and squeezed and squeezed, and wrang me fully out.)

It’s so far back in time. The critics say
“we have no reason to believe he in
any sense ever reached home.” Deserved
wasps hover on his gravesite. “The scold,” what
Pindar called him. Horsetail-helmed, liver-tongued
and ever hard as stakes of Osage Orange.
Who hated the polish of frauds and hacks,
hated tasteless desire, boring dinners.
Overlook my ways, he’d say. I’m countrified.
Eat with my hands. Read naked in the stock tank.
Banned in Sparta for his candor. In Rome
all trainee-priests were forbidden his poems.

But to the Spartans, his lascivity
wasn’t the obscenity. What burned them up
is just what carries me through unmoored months,
has carried me, and has to sound my poem
for one who had no epic in him, had
just one shot voice, a tetchy melody:
Who, as he tells it, bleeding on Thasos
in the screech of battle, perceives he loves
his life more than that fight, more than duty
to any reckless collectivity,
shrugs off his prized and perfectly good shield
because he can run faster without it,
and abandons those slopes, to start over.