Poems Page 4

  preserve a fellow soul for kinder shores.

  I.18

  No question it’s lonely here,

  a quiet place for a moan,

  as a westerly breeze takes hold of the empty copse.

  Perfect for freely venting repressed grudges,

  (if the rocks can keep a secret).

  Where to begin, Cynthia, your fit of pique?

  The exact point, Cynthia, when

  you triggered my weepy mode?

  One of the lucky lovers,

  they used to call me:

  loving you proved to be the blot on my record.

  Just deserts? Name the charges that changed your mind.

  A new girl causing you grief?

  Would you come back to me if

  I said no other woman

  had laid her pretty feet across my doorstep?

  I owe you a hard time for my misery,

  but I won’t get so incensed I provoke

  your righteous indignation,

  those eyes all swollen from crying.

  Maybe I’m not looking lovelorn –

  no change of complexion,

  a certain lack of sincerity in my face?

  These trees can bear witness – they’re experts on love,

  the beech, the fir that Pan fancied –

  to how my words echo in their soft shade,

  ‘Cynthia’ carved on their bark!

  Or could my distress at your maltreatment of me

  have caused it (but that’s only known

  to your door – and he’s not talking)?

  Cravenly I’ve got used

  to obeying your haughty orders,

  no complaints or tearful outbursts.

  My reward? These thorn-covered hills and chilly rocks,

  restless sleep on an overgrown track;

  and any tale of woe I care to tell

  is strictly for the trilling birds.

  Be how you like, I shall still make

  the woods resound with ‘Cynthia’,

  your name never lost in the bare boulders.

  I.19

  I am not now afraid of death,

  Cynthia;

  the due day, the funeral pyre,

  I’m ready for it.

  But that you might not love me when I’m gone –

  that fear is worse than the end of life itself.

  I did not fall in love so casually

  that it can vanish, forgotten

  when I’m dust.

  The hero Protesilaus,

  even in the underworld murk,

  could not stop remembering

  the wife who had been his joy,

  but came, a ghost, to his old home,

  longing to clasp her with insubstantial hands.

  Whatever I’ll be in the afterlife,

  I’ll be yours even as a spirit:

  great love can transit the frontiers of death.

  Let them come en masse,

  the beautiful widows of Troy

  that fell as plunder to the men of Greece –

  not one will outshine you in my eyes,

  Cynthia.

  And even if (as may Earth grant in fairness)

  a long old age awaits you,

  when you join me I shall still love you

  and weep.

  Could you, in life, feel that from my embers?

  Then death, wherever it comes,

  will not taste sour.

  My fear is you’ll forget my tomb,

  Cynthia,

  distracted from my dust by cruel Amor,

  compelled (against your will)

  to dry your tears:

  relentless pressure can bend a girl’s firmest resolve.

  So while we may, let us exult in love

  that never can be long enough.

  I.20

  In the name of my undying love for you, Gallus, this piece

  of advice – don’t let it slip from your vacuous mind.

  Cruel fortune often frowns on the incautious lover,

  as the Argonauts found to their cost at the River Ascanius.

  You burn for a Hylas resembling the one in this story,

  sharing his name and rivalling him in beauty.

  Exploring the sacred streams of wooded Umbria,

  dipping your toe in the water of the Aniene,

  pacing the giants’ beach in the Bay of Naples –

  wherever a wandering river is your host,

  protect that boy from the grasping hands of nymphs

  (our Italian ones are no less lustful).

  Or else it’s barren mountains and freezing boulders

  for you, Gallus, not to mention uncharted lakes.

  That’s what Hercules had to endure as he wandered weeping

  in foreign lands. (The Ascanius was unmoved.)

  The story: once upon a time, the good ship Argo

  slipped out of dock in Thessaly on the long voyage

  to Colchis, glided through the Dardanelles

  and anchored off the rocks of Mysia.

  Our band of heroes, disembarking on the calm shore,

  covered the beach with piles of soft foliage.

  Hercules’ companion, though, had gone further to find

  precious water supplies from a secluded spring.

  The two sons of the North Wind followed him,

  Zetes sometimes in the lead, sometimes Calais,

  hovering as they homed in to snatch kisses

  or taking turns to plant them upside down:

  he mocks them as they hang on wing-tip,

  beats off the flying ambush with a branch.

  And they’re gone …

  But Hylas – hélas! – was heading towards the dryads.

  The spring was under the crest of Mount Arganthus,

  a desirable water home for the local nymphs;

  above it dew-flecked apples

  hung, uncultivated, from wild trees,

  lilies sprang all round from the flooded meadow,

  white among crimson poppies.

  The boy, clipping them off with his fingernails,

  puts flowers ahead of his appointed task;

  he leans, insouciant, over the pretty pool,

  spinning out his mission to admire the reflections.

  At last he dips his hands to collect the water,

  leaning on his right arm for a full measure.

  Fired by his beauty, the dryad girls

  stopped their usual dances in amazement;

  he slipped, they pulled him easily into the water,

  the splash of his body the only sound he made.

  Far away, Hercules calls three times, ‘Hylas’; the only

  answer the breeze brings: the name off the distant mountains.

  Be warned, Gallus, and take care of your love:

  don’t trust those nymphs with a gorgeous Hylas again.

  I.21

  Soldier wounded in the siege of Perugia,

  hurrying to avoid the fate I suffered,

  why do your eyes stare as you turn, hearing my groan?

  I’m on your side, one of the same army.

  I hope you survive to gladden your parents with your homecoming:

  just let my sister hear your tearful account –

  how I eluded the blades of Octavian’s swords,

  but not the hands of unknown assassins;

  she’ll find many bones scattered on the Apennine

  ridges, but should know that these are mine.

  I.22

  Who I am, where I’m from, what is my family,

  you often ask me, Tullus, as a friend.

  You know the tombs of Perugia that scar our land,

  Italy’s burial place in her time of trouble,

  when Roman discord drove her citizens to ruin.

  Etruria’s dust brought me my private sorrow,

  allowing the body of my kinsman to lie abandoned

  with no earth to cover up his bones.


  Where it comes closest to the fields below the city,

  the fertile soil of Umbria gave me birth.

  BOOK TWO

  II.1

  You ask why I keep writing about love,

  why folk recite this unmanly verse of mine.

  It’s not Calliope or Apollo dictating it to me:

  the girl herself is my sole inspiration.

  Does she promenade in gleaming silk from Kos?

  A whole volume will be about her dress.

  Did I see her stroll with a lock straying down her forehead?

  It makes her proud to go out when her hairstyle’s praised.

  When she strikes song from the lyre with ivory fingers,

  I’m amazed at how her hands make art seem easy;

  when she lets her eyelids droop in search of sleep,

  I find a thousand new causes for poetry;

  when she tears off all her clothes to engage with me,

  ah, think of the long Iliads we compose.

  In short, whatever it is she’s done or said,

  a historical epic can grow out of … nothing!

  Maecenas, if fate had given me the power

  to lead bands of heroes into combat,

  I wouldn’t write of Titans, or how giants piled

  mountains on each other to build a road to heaven,

  or ancient Thebes, or Troy that made Homer famous,

  how Xerxes linked two seas with a canal,

  Romulus’ reign, the arrogance of towering Carthage,

  the threats of the Cimbri and how Marius defeated them …

  I’d record the martial feats of your friend Augustus,

  and you, after him, would be my second theme.

  If I wrote of Modena, the civil strife at Philippi,

  the rout off Sicily in the naval clash,

  the ruined homes of the ancient Etruscan race,

  the captured shores of Ptolemy’s lighthouse island,

  Egypt and the Nile, when its seven streams

  were humbled, taken to Rome in effigy,

  when gold chains hung around the necks of kings

  and the prows of Actium rolled down the Sacred Way –

  my muse would weave you into those tales of war,

  Maecenas, ever loyal whether peace comes or goes.

  Callimachus, though, doesn’t have the lung-power

  to sing of Jupiter’s showdown with the giant,

  nor can my chest summon the thunderous tones

  to trace Augustus back to his Trojan forebears.

  The sailor talks of winds, the ploughman of oxen;

  the soldier counts his wounds, the shepherd sheep;

  my kind fight their battles between the sheets:

  let’s all devote our days to the skills we excel in.

  Dulce et decorum est in amore mori;

  sweet too to enjoy one love: may I always do so,

  even if I have to drink Phaedra’s potions

  that failed to work upon her stepson,

  even if I have to die of Circe’s herbs

  or Medea heats her cauldron on the fire.

  Since one woman has taken my feelings hostage,

  my funeral cortege will start from her home.

  All human ailments have their own medicine;

  only for love there is no specialist.

  Machaon cured Philoctetes’ paralysed legs,

  the centaur Chiron healed the eyes of Phoenix;

  the doctor god restored with Cretan herbs

  dead Androgeon to his father’s home;

  young Telephus, wounded by Achilles’ spear,

  received the remedy from the self-same blade.

  Anyone who can rid me of my affliction

  will be able to put the fruit in Tantalus’ hand,

  or fill the leaky jars with the Danaids’ pots

  to spare their delicate necks from all that water,

  or free Prometheus from the Caucasus rock,

  driving the vulture from his midriff…

  So when the Fates decide my time is up,

  and I’m just a short name on a scrap of marble,

  Maecenas, hope and envy of young Romans,

  source of my glory both in life and death,

  should your road chance to bring you near my tomb,

  pull up your British chariot with carved fittings,

  and strew my ash with tears and words like these:

  ‘His ruin was a woman’s cruelties.’

  II.2

  Free at last, I had thought of having my bed to myself,

  but Amor, after striking a peace-deal, double-crossed me…

  Why is a face like that allowed to exist on earth?

  Jupiter, I’ll overlook your conquests of old.

  Her hair’s tawny, her fingers long; she walks tall

  using her whole body, a worthy sister for Jove,

  or like Minerva striding to the altars of Athens,

  the Gorgon’s serpentine locks upon her breastplate.

  Give up, you goddesses shepherd Paris watched

  lowering your underwear on Ida’s peaks.

  May age refuse to change her face, even if

  she lives the centuries of the Sibyl of Cuma.

  II.3

  ‘You said no woman can affect you now.

  Wrong! Your arrogance fell at the first hurdle.

  You take a break for barely one month and

  another book’s about to spread scandal about you.’

  I was wondering whether a fish might survive on dry sand,

  or a wild boar, perhaps, out at sea,

  or whether I might burn the candle for serious study:

  you can put off love, never get rid of it.

  It was less her face that snared me, for all its beauty

  (lilies are not whiter than m’lady),

  or her hair fashionably floating down her smooth neck,

  or the fire in her eyes, my twin lodestars,

  or her breasts gleaming through Arabian silk

  (call me a flattering lover, but there’s some reason) –

  than the graceful way she dances when the wine’s served,

  like Ariadne leading the whooping chorus,

  and how she launches into songs like Sappho,

  her skill on the lyre a match for the Muses,

  and when she compares her writings to those of Corinna

  and thinks Erinna’s poems inferior.

  In the first days after you were born, my darling,

  a propitious love-god signalled a good omen.

  Divinities gave you gifts from heaven –

  don’t imagine that you got them from your mother.

  Mortal women could not produce such qualities,

  even after nine months …

  You were born to bring unique glory to the girls of Rome;

  so perhaps you’ll not be content with us human partners,

  and become the first Roman to bed Jupiter …

  Helen’s beauty visits Earth a second time.

  Should I be surprised if our young men are hot for her?

  She would have been a finer cause for Troy’s ruin.

  I used to marvel how a woman had started

  such a war between Europe and Asia at Pergamum.

  No one could fault you, Menelaus, or you, Paris,

  the one for demanding her back, the other for stalling.

  This was the face that Achilles worthily died for;

  even Priam approved it as the casus belli.

  Anyone with ambitions to outstrip the old masters

  should make my true love his model in his painting:

  wherever he exhibits her in the world,

  East or West, he will set it on fire.

  II.4

  A girlfriend, you say?

  Accept you’ll have manifold sins to complain of;

  you’ll make a pitch often, as often be repulsed,

  your poor fingernails ruined by toothmarks,

&n
bsp; the irregular tap of your feet in irritation…

  I myself once plastered my hair

  with gel (what a waste of time),

  walked that slow, studied walk …

  It’s no case for herbal remedies, moonlight magic,

  grasses stewed by Medea or Perimede.

  We don’t know the causes or see the blows coming –

  where this shower of troubles starts is a mystery.

  The patient needs no doctors or comfortable beds;

  it’s not the season or weather that’s bothering him.

  He goes for a walk – the next minute

  his friends are escorting his hearse:

  love’s an unpredictable matter

  (whatever love is).

  Yet I keep every swindling fortune-teller in business.

  Every Gypsy Rose has gone through my dreams ten times…

  I wish my enemies the love of women;

  and all my friends the pleasures of a boy –

  a safe boat to punt down a gentle river:

  what harm can come from such a little stream?

  One word can often mollify a boy:

  a woman won’t be satisfied with your blood.

  II.5

  Is it reasonable, Cynthia, that

  you gallivant around Rome,

  leading a life of public disrepute?

  Have I deserved this? You’ll pay

  for your disloyalty –

  the wind can blow me too in another direction.

  There are hordes of deceitful women

  out there, but I shall find one

  who’ll appreciate being famous through my poems,

  not humiliate me with

  outrageous behaviour, but prick you

  with memories of my long love, your belated tears.

  While I’m still in a fury,

  now’s time for me to part:

  if there’s no pain, love will always creep back.

  The swell of Aegean waves

  does not rise in a north wind

  or black clouds scud about in a treacherous southerly