Adam Tavel
A Grecian Child's Commode
6th c. BC
Encased in glass, this toddler’s training pot
bares seven chipping scars glued snug again
by gloves that puzzled back a rim. The lesson
here is how two thousand years may heave
but hunching doesn’t change. The red design
encircling the bowl fades in scattered flakes.
Impossible to tell if a mother’s arms
are really there, or just geometry
a potter’s brush flared on to raise the price
for tipsy merchants strolling by the docks
whose days were clacking drachmas changing hands.
Fantastical, the tale my professor told
was of Athenian aristocrats
ashamed their youngest son was mute but moaned
and shit through seizure sweats. They gave him up
to their childless slave, a witch, who sang
and swayed him as he quaked. One night she wept
until her tears turned them both to octopi
that swam so deep beyond the Pylos coast
they lost all earthly names inside the sea.
May Night
after Willard Leroy Metcalf’s 1906 painting
The marble mansion glows, a butchered tusk.
Its grand estate is wild and wooded still
though grass that meets the portico is cut
so low it looks like moss, wearing arrowheads
of leaves in patchy dappled shade. The only light
besides the jaundiced sheen from stars is orange
and spilling from a window lamp, obscured
by prickly shrubs too tall to trim without
laddered shears. The orange is meant to draw
us from ourselves, like a diary in flame
or blood a mouth has spit across hot sand.
A patient eye may follow it to find
the maiden strolling robed in aimlessness,
a wan and regal specter, who trails
her nightgown like a tree-torn parachute.
Some yards away, she stares beyond the stairs
she left, their massive column pairs, the door
we cannot see. Alone and turned from us
her beauty is the beauty of a conch
half-glimpsed by lovers strolling down a strand
who think the world a storeroom full of props,
who stop to point and coo while holding hands
then watch the surf return it to the sea.
Whose grumbles has she fled? What father, son,
or groom has driven her desperate for air?
Never mind. She is pacing back inside
to bear their growl again, but lingers here
in forever’s frame, not quite returned
from own-swoop shadow-fall, another bride
who drags her dewy hem and cannot hide.
Its grand estate is wild and wooded still
though grass that meets the portico is cut
so low it looks like moss, wearing arrowheads
of leaves in patchy dappled shade. The only light
besides the jaundiced sheen from stars is orange
and spilling from a window lamp, obscured
by prickly shrubs too tall to trim without
laddered shears. The orange is meant to draw
us from ourselves, like a diary in flame
or blood a mouth has spit across hot sand.
A patient eye may follow it to find
the maiden strolling robed in aimlessness,
a wan and regal specter, who trails
her nightgown like a tree-torn parachute.
Some yards away, she stares beyond the stairs
she left, their massive column pairs, the door
we cannot see. Alone and turned from us
her beauty is the beauty of a conch
half-glimpsed by lovers strolling down a strand
who think the world a storeroom full of props,
who stop to point and coo while holding hands
then watch the surf return it to the sea.
Whose grumbles has she fled? What father, son,
or groom has driven her desperate for air?
Never mind. She is pacing back inside
to bear their growl again, but lingers here
in forever’s frame, not quite returned
from own-swoop shadow-fall, another bride
who drags her dewy hem and cannot hide.
--
Adam Tavel is the author of five books of poetry, including the forthcoming Green Regalia (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2022). His most recent collection, Catafalque, won the Richard Wilbur Award (University of Evansville Press, 2018). His recent poems appear, or will soon appear, in Ploughshares, The Georgia Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Ninth Letter, The Massachusetts Review, Copper Nickel, and Western Humanities Review, among others. You can find him online at http://adamtavel.com/.