Poems Page 5
as quickly as angry lovers
change their tune; while you still can,
duck your neck from out that heavy yoke.
It won’t hurt at all, or at least
not after the first night:
all love pains are mild, if you just wait them out.
By the sweet laws imposed
by your patron goddess Juno,
stop hurting me with your spite, my darling:
It’s not just a bull that strikes
an enemy with its horns –
even a wounded sheep fights its attacker.
I’m not going to tear the clothes
from off your faithless body,
my anger won’t break down your bolted doors,
nor shall I pull out your plaited
hair in a fit of rage
or dig my fingers into you to hurt you.
I’ll leave that unbecoming
retaliation to some peasant,
it’s not for a poet wreathed in an ivy garland.
No, I’ll write something that can’t be
erased for the rest of your life:
‘Cynthia so lovely and such an easy lay.’
You may have nothing but scorn
for gossip, but believe me,
that will cause your cheeks to pale, my Cynthia.
II.6
No similar crowd besieged the house of Lais,
though all Greece was prostrate outside;
nor did such numbers once mob Thais,
who kept the men of Athens satisfied;
and Phryne, who could have rebuilt Thebes’ ruins,
never pocketed so many contributions.
You even invent imaginary male relations
to ensure a supply of those you can decently kiss.
Pictures of young men upset me, even their names,
a baby boy in a cradle who can’t even blabber.
It upsets me if your sister or mother
kisses you, or a girlfriend shares your bedroom.
Everything upsets me: insecurity – pay no heed!
I see a skirt: I think there’s a man inside.
Sex. In the past it led to wars,
was at the root of the carnage at Troy;
the same insanity made the Centaurs
smash their sharp-edged cups against Pirithous.
But why look for Greek examples? Romulus,
fed on harsh she-wolf milk, gave instruction in crime:
how to rape the Sabine virgins and get away;
thanks to him Amor now runs riot in Rome.
What point in building temples of Chastity
if brides simply go wherever they please?
I bless the wives of Admetus and Ulysses,
any woman who prefers her husband’s home.
Whoever started painting rude pictures,
decorating respectable homes with indecent scenes,
corrupted the innocent eyes of girls,
wanting them to share his depravity.
May he moan in hell, the man who used those skills
to disclose rites hidden in silent ecstasy!
Houses were never adorned in times past with those figures:
you wouldn’t find crimes plastered on the walls.
Now the spider has wrapped undeserving shrines,
grass overgrows unjustly abandoned deities.
Do I put guards on you, bar your door,
so no enemy foot may pass through?
Surveillance is futile if the will’s not there;
being ashamed to cheat on me, Cynthia,
would be security enough for you.
II.7
You must have celebrated, Cynthia:
they pulled the law we had long dreaded
would split us up (though even Jupiter
can’t part lovers against their will).
Caesar is great, but great in war:
defeated tribes don’t count in love.
No wife or girlfriend will divide
us – you’ll always be both for me.
I’d frankly rather be beheaded
than waste good torches on a bride,
or, as a groom, pass your closed door,
lamenting what I had betrayed.
Worse than a funeral dirge, that wedding march
would ruin, darling, your sweet sleep!
Breed sons for national victory?
No soldier’s coming from my blood.
But for a legionnaire in Cynthia’s army,
Castor’s great horse would not suffice.
You’re why they read my poetry
even beside the Dnieper’s winter ice.
It’s you alone I want to please and keep:
that’s more to me than fatherhood.
II.8
My long-time lover is snatched away
and you tell me to keep a stiff upper lip, my friend?
There’s a unique nastiness to love quarrels:
garotte me and my rage might abate.
Can I watch her lie in the crook of another man’s arm?
They said she was mine and now they’ll say she’s not?
Great leaders, great dictators have often fallen;
Thebes and towering Troy – they’re history.
So you’ll die in the flush of youth, Propertius;
die then, make her happy!
She can bother my ghost, chase after my shade,
dance on my pyre, trample my bones!
Didn’t Haemon fall on Antigone’s tomb,
stabbing himself with his own sword?
Didn’t he mix his bones with hers,
rather than go home without her?
Don’t think you’ll escape: you’ll have to die with me;
the blood of both of us dripping from one blade,
shameful as that death will be to me;
shameful maybe – but you’ll die.
Achilles, when his woman was taken away,
hung up his weapons, alone in his tent.
He’d seen the Greek rout, the bodies on the shore,
Hector’s torches, the Greek camp swarming like ants;
Patroclus disfigured, smeared with sand,
lying dead, tangle-haired;
he sat through it all because of beautiful Briseis,
such pain boiled in him for his stolen love.
When the captive was returned, belated amends made,
he dragged the mighty Hector behind his horses.
I don’t have Achilles’ mother or his armour –
what’s to wonder at if love triumphs over me?
II.9
What he is, I’ve been often; but perhaps in an hour
he’ll be out as well and another will be in.
Penelope managed to see out twenty years
on her own, though such a catch for suitors,
remarriage put off by a pretence of weaving,
her day’s work furtively by night unravelled;
she’d see Ulysses again, scarcely believing
she would, and grown old waiting on his travels.
Briseis, hugging Achilles’ lifeless body,
pummelled her lovely face with maddened hands;
the weeping captive washed her bloodied
lord laid out on Simois’ yellow sand,
then, holding his great bones in her small palms,
Achilles’ corpse cremated, soiled her hair.
Greece boasted loyal brides in ancient times:
honour prevailed amid carnage and war.
You did not last one night without a partner
or pass a solitary morning, faithless hussy.
What if I were a soldier in the far
East Indies, or my ship becalmed at sea?
You knocked back the wine and laughed out loud;
no doubt I figured in your malicious talk.
You even chase a man who once walked out.
Let’s hope you make it with him, and good luck!
When Styx’s waters swirled around your head,
was it for this I prayed you would recover
and stood with weeping friends beside your bed?
What sign then, madam, of your latest lover?
Not hard for you to spin deceptive tales:
it’s something women always learned to do.
The leaves don’t flutter in a wintry gale
and treacherous Libyan shoals don’t shift as soon
as promises collapse under female
anger for reasons serious or no.
The stars are witness and the morning dew,
the door that opened after a night-long wait,
I never loved another more than you,
nor will I now, for all your spite.
No woman will leave imprints on my pillow:
if I cannot be yours I’ll stay alone.
And if I’ve lived life rightly, may that fellow
at love-making’s crescendo turn to stone!
II.10
High time for a different dance on the slopes of Helicon,
time to clear the field for the cavalry.
I’d like to report on squadrons itching for combat,
detail The Leader’s Roman campaigns.
If my powers fail, I’ll get credit certainly
for effort: in a major enterprise
just the aspiration to do it is enough.
‘Began with love lyric, later turned to epic.’
I’ll sing of war, the girl theme being written out.
I’m perfecting the furrowed brow, the more ponderous step;
my Muse is teaching me a new instrument.
Brain, stop thinking trivial verse; flex
your muscles, Muses; the deep voice is needed now.
The Euphrates is saying no more cover for
the Parthian horsemen’s rear-guard;
it’s sorry it stopped the Crassi going home.
Even India, Augustus, is stretching out
its neck for your yoke; the virgin land
of Arabia trembles before you;
and any country cowering at the world’s end
is going to feel your conquering hand hereafter.
That’s the camp I’ll follow; hymning your campaigns
will make me a great bard (I hope I live to see it).
When you can’t reach a statue’s head to place a garland,
lay it beneath its feet;
I can’t – at the moment – scale the heights of glory,
so offer cheap incense in a poor man’s rites.
My poems have not yet climbed Hesiod’s mountain,
but are washed in the valley stream by Love.
II.11
Let others write about you, or you will be unknown:
let him praise you who sows in sterile ground.
The black day, believe me, will carry off all your gifts
along with you on one funeral bier;
and the traveller will ignore your remains as he goes past,
not saying: ‘This ash was once a cultured girl.’
II.12
Amazing hands, don’t you think,
whoever first painted love as a child?
He saw that lovers live irrational lives,
trivial concerns eclipse the greater good.
He pointedly added wings for a quick getaway
when the god takes off from the human heart;
we are tossed about from one wave to the next:
our breeze doesn’t keep to any quarter.
And rightly his hand is armed with barbed arrows,
a quiver slung across both shoulders –
he takes us out before we spot the enemy,
no chance of escaping unscathed.
In me his shafts remain – and his childish image;
but certainly he’s lost his wings,
for he’s flying nowhere from my chest,
waging endless war within my veins.
What kicks do you get, boy, living in dried-out bones?
Shame on you, take your weapons some other place.
Better try your poison on those yet to taste it;
I’m not being thrashed, just my flimsy shadow.
Lose me, and who’ll sing of you then
(my Muse’s light touch brought you great renown),
or the head and fingers of my dark-eyed love
and how softly, when she walks, her feet move?
II.13
All the arrows in Persia
are less than the darts Amor
has fixed in my chest. He’s banned me
from spurning the slender Muses,
ordered me to live in the grove of Helicon;
not so I might make oaks
listen to my words or play
pied piper to wild animals,
rather that Cynthia might be
bewitched by my verse: then my art
would outstrip the fame of Linus.
It’s not so much I admire
good looks or a woman who boasts
famous ancestry; what I like
is reciting my poems in the lap
of a well-read girl and having
her delicate ear approve them.
If so, what do I care
for the babble of the crowd,
safe in my true-love’s judgment?
If she’ll listen favourably
to my peace offering, I
can tolerate even Jupiter’s ill-will.
So when death shuts my eyes,
here are my funeral directions:
no long line of family images in my cortege,
no vain trumpet lament for my fate,
no ivory stand for my coffin,
no gold-braided sheet for my body,
no row of scent-bearing dishes.
What do I want?
The small observances of a plebeian funeral.
I’ll be happy to take three slim volumes
as a special gift for Persephone.
You’ll be following, baring and tearing
your breast, you’ll never tire
of calling out my name,
planting last kisses on
my cold lips, as a jar
of Syrian unguent is offered.
Then when fire has reduced
me to ashes, a little urn
can hold my remains, a bay shrub
placed over my humble tomb
to shade the site of my burnt-out
pyre, and a two-line inscription:
WHO LIES HERE NOW, STARK DUST,
WAS SERVANT OF JUST ONE LOVE.
My grave will be no less famous
than the bloody tomb of Achilles.
When you feel your own end coming,
remember to visit, white-haired,
once again these memorial stones.
Meanwhile, don’t spurn me in death –
the earth can divine the truth.
One of the sister Fates
should have ordered me to surrender
my soul as I slept in my cradle.
Why preserve the breath
of a life that’s so uncertain?
Nestor lived three generations.
Had a Trojan soldier cut short
his old age on the Greek earthworks,
he’d never have seen Antilochus’
body interred or said:
‘Death, why do you come so late?’
You’ll sometimes weep for your lost
lover: it’s right to always
love men who have gone before.
A wild boar killed the fair
Adonis hunting in Cyprus;
Venus washed his beautiful
body in the marsh pool, they say,
and wandered, her hair unkempt.
Cynthia, you’ll call in vain
to my silent ghost to return:
what can my crumbled bones reply to you?
II.14
Happiness was:
Agamemnon when he won
the Trojan War, pocketing that city’s wealth;
Ulysses when his wanderings were done
and his keel touched the sand of Ithaca;
Electra seeing Orestes was not dead,
having mourned her brother’s supposed remains;
Ariadne finding Theseus unharmed,
led from the labyrinth by her ball of thread.
My pleasures last night exceeded those by far:
one more like it and I shall be immortal.
I once went pleading to her with bowed head,
only to hear her say I was cheap as dirt.
Now her fastidiousness is no obstacle,
she can’t sit there, unmoved by my entreaties.
My one regret – I learned the trick so late,
like medicine to make a corpse feel well.
The path was clear: I was too blind to see it.
(No one sees anything when they’re lovelorn.)
What I grasped was this: lovers must show scorn.
Yesterday she was ‘busy’; today she’ll come.
Rivals pounded her door, called her their ‘lady-love’;
she ignored them, her head snuggled against me.
Victory over the Parthians? Small potatoes!
Here are my spoils, my captured kings, my chariot.
Venus, I’m nailing my offerings to your temple,
and underneath some rhyme like this:
PROPERTIUS LAYS THESE GIFTS BEFORE YOUR SHRINE
IN THANKS FOR ONE WHOLE NIGHT WHEN SHE WAS MINE.
It’s your decision, darling, whether my boat
comes safe to port or founders in the shallows.
If any offence by me should change your mind,
find me at your doorway – lying lifeless.
II.15
Yes!
A night to circle on the calendar!
Even the bed enjoyed my darling’s body!
She kissed my eyes open when they drooped in sleep:
‘Just lying there, you slacker?’