Rome’s Mythic Hills Among Rome's mythic hills this is what I told you: The Moon is an old and silver rimmed lover, blood burned pewter at night prowling the Colosseum's sands. Why are Americans so savage? Look to the wolf nature engendered by Rome, bird Auguries spun into DNA across a time never ended. The world did not become dark. The wolf retired to her lair and slept while the West went into supernatural amnesia. Reason and fancy are strange bedfellows. Shall you undergo Inquisition? Perhaps it's been following all of us. Come now, take my hand. Let us stroll through these familiar ruins, Faustina. Soon the mother of the world will be dead. Bring Us Soft Graces If we only could achieve a kind of grace, to love and feast as the ancients did, like gods turning in bed on Mt. Olympus. I think we both have long been (futilely) looking for Plato’s sphere but we can’t even find half an orange to piece back together, let alone imagine a future spoken out in syncopated syllables. If we could we would incarnate both spirit and flesh in moments undarkened by the past pains that others have brought. But one can never escape those textured times, for what we were always walks with us, like shadows cast on a yellowed photograph. The body we once had is not the flesh we now carry, for the cells replace every seven years. The mind that we once had has been tempered with interactions of others where we listened to their foolish thoughts. Abstracted form does hold meaning, and that is what we have become: a type of fragmented cubism rendered up in 1920s Paris. If only we could embrace soft graces. If only we could make the pieces fit a new puzzle. Ah, wouldn’t it be pretty to think so. When the Art No Longer Remains Seventeen turned to thirty-five deep in the troughs of his own tides he will presently forget the nights and days with her, the shared moons from month to month. The tales that they created, moments of ice and fire, of victories on the playing fields, defeats that were ignored. Stories can only carry so far, before they settle into mystery and myth, into buried layer after layer, where they change, through the years and move us back to truck headlights knifing the dark on the interstate, to going down to the still waters and drinking, to wash off the deep sins that can never be winter white. They weren’t really battles, no dark ages crusades, merely seasonal skirmishes that neither knew the meaning of. I have seen many autumns with Bradford leaves blazed and burnt reds, oranges, and yellows, the ripened pear and apple, leaves burnt with frost, foliage like some randomly thrown design, an Arabian carpet thick with memory, desire. Is there a Mind producing a Design? This is a mystery that cannot be plumbed, only hinted at by art, and we never had a design, only a random blueprint made up as we went along.
Ralph Monday is Professor of English at RSCC in Harriman, TN. Hundreds of poems published. Books: Al l American Girl and Other Poems, 2014. Empty Houses and American Renditions, 2015. Narcissus the Sorcerer, 2015. Bergman’s Island & Other Poems, 2021, The Book of Appalachia 2023, and a humanities text, 2018. Member Lincoln Memorial University Literary Hall of Fame. Twitter @RalphMonday Poets&Writers https://www.pw.org/directory/writers/ralph_monday