Kathleen Graber

The Eternal City

The attic fan rattles in its perfect tin house--as seemingly ceaseless
as the body's unquiet engine. Today something's gone awry: the drone,
usually poised, a silent arpeggio, has become a disinterested scream.
This is the third heat wave of July. Again the fire department
sounds the citywide alarm & then police cars wail. Rome is burning!
But Rome is not burning. Instead I am reading, in a shrill hum,
about Marcus Aurelius--because this is what I do on days too hot
to move--the heads of the red geraniums steaming in their planters--
too hot to imagine that we might send up our lives in flames.
The mind is more than a simple container, the junk drawer
beside the stove. My thoughts clang like pennies in the dryer.
O, my racket--ice against the blender's wall of glass. The Eternal City,
Brodsky writes, is like a gigantic old brain, one that's grown
a little weary of the world. And what have we here? Tarnished keys.
A chipped teardrop from some dining room's chandelier. The trick
must be to love both the blade & the air it shatters. A flock of birds
meets the airplane's roaring turbines. We pass the stuff from which
we're made--look, a single pocked marble & an exhausted emery board--
through our own propellers. The phone rings, but I don't answer
though I've been expecting it. It stops, then rings again. Still--
I don't pick up. Loneliness, our one defendable empire. Aurelius, too,
loved metaphors: the inland lake on the island Aenaria; in that lake,
there is another island, it, too, inhabited. O, my acrobats, in the dark
capital of nested boxes, be with me always, secure & tumbling.

Book One

From my grandfather Verus, I learned good morals and the government of my temper. From the reputations and remembrance of my father, modesty and a manly character.

--Marcus Aurelius

From my mother's sister Peg, I failed to learn frugality
though she would add last night's peas to the morning's eggs.
She wore her neighbors' spotted hand-me-downs
until the exhausted seams gave out & even then, she saved
the buttons. And, now, here they are. Do you know the pleasure
of the button box, a red cookie tin with a poinsettia and holly sprig
pictured on its lid? Or its smell? Rust, yes, but also another
putrefaction, the outgas of cellulose decaying. White shirt buttons
evaporating into chalk, like those effervescent tablets used to clean
false teeth. And the salt of those fingers--Or have I invented this?--
which polished each disc against the sewn-to-fit mouths
of wool coats & cotton blouses. Bitter smell of the plastic cowboys
which fell one afternoon out of my brother's toybox & into mine.
And what did I learn from my brother? To love Latin & cowboys
& Classics Illustrated comic books. And, finally, to love
only the stories & set pictures aside. Here, right here,
is that same dusty metal bin, that same crumbling stack
of colorful pages--though Annie Oakley & Buffalo Bill disappeared
with the christening cups & the baby shoes when the old house
was sold. Can you see that all of this is only so much evidence now
of our never-letting-go? Half the buttons still trail old threads
from their brass shanks & a few stubbornly clutch their cloth.
But from the great orator Fronto, we learn that the best simile
must be human: Orpheus rued his turning to look back;
had he looked and walked straight ahead he would not have rued.
Truly, I tell you, I don't know how it has come again to this.

Book Two

How quickly all things disappear, in the universe the bodies themselves, but in time the remembrance of them....

--Marcus Aurelius

Truly, I tell you, I don't know how it's come again to this.
Aurelius wanted the simple plank bed & skin of the philosopher,
but he was asked to hold an empire. He died beside the Danube
at war again against the Germans. The friend of a friend has declared
a year without purchase. Food, yes, soap & shampoo, stamps,
but no new shoes, no wine, no underwear. If she's given a gift, she must,
in order to keep it, relinquish something else. It's an arbitrary rule,
but you know--don't you?--even the most cautious can't stop.
At the bottom of yet another box of tangled black velvet ribbon,
curtain hooks, playing cards & half-full wooden spools
of Paragon silk thread, a Susan B. Anthony one dollar coin.
It's rarely so simple: unambiguous currency, the clean tolling of worth.
I can toss out spare change more easily than this steel clamp--
the wrong size for whatever job it was meant to do. I declare this
the season of coming to order. Yet my objects defy me. What
is the value of three skeleton keys? Or this cardboard ruler that arrived
decades ago in a package of Kraft Caramels. Today I am in love again
with The Wonder Book of nickel sewing needles, a white airplane
in an oval of blue sky on the cover. I cannot tell the inherited
from the found, the legacy from what I have bred from it.
Remember the Parthians & the Quadi. Never allow them into your life.

Book Three

They know not how many things are signified by the words stealing, sowing, buying, keeping quiet, seeing what ought to be done; for this is not effected by eyes, but by another kind of vision.

--Marcus Aurelius

Remember the Quadi and the Parthians. Never allow them
into your life. Last night at work, before I knew it--while I was busy
selling a t-shirt, the one with the glow-in-the-dark skeleton
in the electric chair, to Canadian tourists--an addict convinced me
to keep an eye on his six year old son. Slurring something
as simple as Don't let him go nowhere, he turned & stepped
into the congress of night-strollers on the boardwalk.
Where did he go? the child wondered. After ten minutes, he asked,
How long has he been gone? Soon, though, the father returned,
stood in the doorway of the shop, called his son's name once,
& they vanished. In his relief, the boy forgot the jarred goldfish
he'd won by tossing a coin into its bowl. At midnight, I placed it
into the opened hand of a sun-burnt girl wearing thick black glasses,
knee high socks, & a 14 gauge, surgical steel lip ring--having lost
somewhere in the past the urge to take so grave a responsibility
upon myself. The fish will die, maybe it's dead already. And I'm tired
of feeling sad. What is this other kind of vision that recognizes already
the end in sight, that foresees only disaster? Today I'm giving away
two bags of clothing I've never worn & then I'm going to run in place
at the gym while I listen to Moby Dick on tape. We discussed
puppets & how much he likes the big blocks at school.
We considered how slowly time seems to pass when you're waiting.

Book Four

If souls continue to exist, how does the air contain them from eternity? --But how does the earth contain the bodies of those who have been buried from time so remote?

--Marcus Aurelius

Consider how slowly time seems to pass when we're waiting.
When we return from a walk, my dog begins immediately
to wait for the next. If you are waiting, Reader, I can tell you only
that somewhere it is still summer. That there are a dozen books
in Aurelius's Meditations, written in his old age, in his tents
on foreign battlefields as he waited through the last decade
of his life to die. Do you know Jack Gilbert's poem about a man
carrying a box in his arms? He balances his burden, shifts it,
so he will never need to set it down. My cellar is full of boxes.
In this one: bleached shells--conch, scallops, snails--
which I carried home, one by one, in a childhood I've abandoned.
The girl I was shakes her head like a disappointed ghost.
Didn't she know the sea would always bring in more? Mollusks
& the brittle, translucent husks of razor clams like the long fingernails
that grow in the grave. A box of bones awaiting a new purpose
that will not come. Archimedes gave numbers to the spiral
of the sailor's coiled rope, but the nautilus waited centuries
for Descartes to decode its elegant equiangular whorls.
Without shells, the cycloid arc, Christopher Wren concluded,
the spire would not be possible. The dog stares at the door & sighs.
We carry our waiting & our calcium carbonate cage.
We wait for the future to divine for us the past. I think of Aurelius
who thought of Epictetus: Thou art a little soul bearing about a corpse.

---

Kathleen Graber's first collection, Correspondence, was the winner of the 2005 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. She is currently a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University. She has received fellowships from The Rona Jaffe Foundation and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. During the summer months, she and her husband live in her hometown of Wildwood, New Jersey, where they operate a seasonal music business on the boardwalk. contents | previous | next