Placid, windless,
the dark boat moves
over the wine-dark sea.
Naked in the
windless sail’s shade,
Paris prepares to break wind;
his simpering stolen bride turns
her face towards Sparta,
towards Troia,
once, twice,
out of focus;
the oars rise and fall,
walking in pace
over the water.
Paris smiles, his noble
buttocks glisten like
marble in the sun;
an eagle from Jove
turns a theosophical eye
on the godlike posterior;
somewhere Ulysses babbles on.
In the diamond-studded east
fire is prepared,
drums beat;
Thracian queens are deployed
in squads of ten and
Aeneas soon will walk in hell.
Not a sound is heard
over the triumphant trumpeting
of Paris relieved.
Behind and ahead
the serene sea stretches,
the small sea, the antique sea,
between kingdoms, fiefs,
in harsh geometric symmetry;
the sea like a sleeping ear.
So fares
the heedless prince
over the windless wave
on halcyon days
when friends and enemies
come to rest
at the ends of
palace gardens;
Nemesis
in guise of hospitium.
Paris laughs,
but this incense
has the stink
of sacrifice to come,
death on all sides,
all hands to the slaughter;
a burning city,
blood lust and burning
and from the ruins
words in the silence
come to us,
old weapons,
diadems,
remnants of a
private wall.
We see wide Troy,
the antiquity
independent of time,
the ancestral fires
eye to eye
and all is as
it was and will be;
a grave, a tomb,
famous as Cadmus,
riddling without answer.
