Base Statue
You made marble out of me.
Course grain in the grey night
All seeming straight; a Parthenon
High and lifted up.
More finely wrought
Still more finely felt.
Ductile tears shape us:
The soft sound of the wind
Wears away our cares
And our name.
I posted the following piece a while ago on Facebook, but in my re-organization of all my materials and documents found I had lost it. A friend recently found it lurking in the corners of a private message and got it back to me.
It was written during a course on the influence of Alexander – both his campaigns and life, and the fractured kingdoms that arose in the Asia-Minor, Palestine, Egypt, and Persia – and captures a particularly frustrating period of Alexander’s conquest East. His goal was to continue subduing nations until he ran into the great ocean (which they believed roughly circled the known world), but his troops (the hardiest Macedonian soldiers of a generation) were fed up with the dream; they had conquered more territory than any civilization in such a short period, defended the craziest glory-seeking King in the and many longed for peace and a stable society.
This piece offers their perspective of an incensed master – a godlike man who seemed impervious, and whom they had disappointed by their lack of vision, stamina and courage.
The Great?
Wading in the dust, far-flung from the ancient east,
Sifting through the cradle of mighty Porus,
Wretching in the dawn and in the dusk,
A slow greatness stirred in anger.
Those men, who met arrows with their chests,
Bore a bier on their shields,
And watched him rise again, and again,
Drenched in immortal drops, unsated,
Languished under the Bactrian sun.
Where oh Macedon are your fathers,
Where your young men? Gone, all
Long time passing, to soldier on,
On through the weary wastes of this world.
What did you find in Siwah? A thundering voice?
Light? Yes, and sand as here, and fire.
Nausicaa
Jack spent every trade in the city,
Drew deep the coffers of weak
And worn men, to find her.
The morning grass was wet as union dues
Sliding between the fingers
Of oily figures in a shadowy hall.
But if they squeaked at all in this
Ravenous hunt for life,
It was no longer Jack’s axle grinding.
Yet all the rotations of a hundred
Men, torn away from demolition,
Plumbing, or the stillness of a carpenter’s bench,
Brought back no child.
Every box, back room, or hall
Where the billiards spun late into the night,
Was overturned, and turned nothing over.
What was Jack to say when the house sold,
And the heavy, silent toughs
Descended upon a motel at the rim of the city?
It had been a shield against any news,
Cold as steel and weathered,
But now a prison of grief and loss.
On the bed, head bowed and hand
Shaking the ice-cubes to a dull clank,
He drank and let his jaw slack.
The tongue suspended in disbelief,
And eyes a haze of madness and rich memory,
Unseeing as the door creaked
And a gun calmly walked into the room.
Piercing as Athena’s gaze,
Past whisky, sorrow, and the maze of the mind,
The sudden chill of unfamiliar hope:
The child, in the arms of an officer,
Breathing in sunlight from the door.
Contracting Tradition
We are the conventional tribe, cloistered
Beyond the toil and sweat of the heart,
Headed by a reasonable conscription
Of equitable and convenient rights.
Continue, oh age of common sense,
To legalize our constancy by blood,
To colloquialize our marbled speech,
To contextualize our labored works,
To commute our intransitory sentence,
That we (in unity depraved) might
Consecrate to the corrugated gods
Our enflamed and our idiotic wills.
©2017 Todd Anderson. All Rights Reserved.
These Were the Brighter Days
In the half-lit room where children play in the morn,
But where you and I collapse in the evening sprawl,
Wreathed in diluted joy, hazy in the slush of toys,
I reach out for your hand, feel the veins of our wealth
Buried under bronze skin – pulsing with that living
Colour (as iron breathes deeply in the hillside) –
Hold it as a farmer grips a generation of soil.
These half-things, amidst the swirl of dust and news,
Feel all too full, too heavy to bear at twilight.
2017 Todd Anderson. All Rights Reserved.
The Angled Eye 