They brandished their births like spears.
Being there wasn’t enough. Their names
Needed their fathers and their cities
And their spears and the red air of Ilium.
There’s Apisaon lying on his liver
As it curdles and leaks out rib-mangled
From his wound like a clicking tongue
In froth, mind-deep in its porn.
A gray scholar near the end of his talk
Pauses, turns hazel in the maze of his thoughts,
And as he gazes out the window asks,
Why would the father at the end of the Iliad
Peer into Achilles’ tent and, through the bloodgold fire
And smoke-slow seafog, pismire and simply stare
At his son’s stupendous butcher?
He waits for an answer from the weather.
He kneels before the canceling hands of Achilles
That did what they do to the dead of his son
Because they could; and he kisses them.
The father is our first noble disaster.
He knows his role. He knows he’ll beg.
(Though not for the life: the life’s already gristle.)
He’ll beg for the body.
He’ll beg like a pagan for the body.
Even those who survive Achilles don’t.
Priam returned, finally, to Troy’s dented doors
And with every step he took
towards the parting gold ruin,
Hollowed-out
Hector
bucked up and
down on his back.
Even iridescent Helen, a trail
Of billowing silks, poured herself
From her paramour’s arms
And descended with the rest to see
The sieged city surging to see its broken
Breaker of horses. Half shout: “Hope!”
Half bray: “Brave patriot’s sacrifice!”
But Priam can’t bear to look at them.
He only looks back dimly at the door.