Virgil – Contrappasso Magazine: International Writing

Photo (CC) Alessandro Prada @ Flickr

I once saw Charon,
you know,
in a cafe, just off the Via Cavour,
stirring lumps of sugar into his blackened beverage.
He spoke
with all the crunch one would expect of a mid-level deity,
of how would you guess that the free market
also can cross the Styx
– one drachma only! Savings passed on.
When I asked if he could feel the sun’s warmth
he just slurped his drink.
Seven sugars, no milk.

Aeolus? But of course
last time we met
we were bumbling, spilling,
into the gutters of medieval streets
– the works –
small place, behind Navona,
old Od has his wind,
you see,
and little there was,
but to stumble, bumble,
windless
– retirement is never kind on
those late deified
Olympian pensions are small
although he got the next round

‘Tourists!’
laments Virgil
and bottoms the fourth shot
of red, red rum
– part time at the musei vaticani is
/exhausting/
A guide by trade,
he points me true
to the bathroom,
when I ask
– and when I get back, he’s gone!
But the tab is paid.

ABOUT THE POET

TRAVIS MCKENNA is a student of Mathematics and Philosophy, who has also taken very recently to the writing of poetry. He was raised in the western suburbs of Sydney, spent some time abroad in Rome, and now lives in Newtown, in Sydney’s inner west. In addition to poetry, he is currently working on a set of short stories. His undergraduate study was in Classics and Italian Studies, with a special interest in the Renaissance.

Photo (CC) Tango7174 @ Wikimedia Commons

Virgil at Mantua, 1977

Well done maestro! High on the monument
you stand. Right arm outstretched instructs
the town, palm turned in the classic pose
of a Monty Python General: settling the laws,
fingering a grateful pigeon. Left elbow crooks
the book you wrote for Princes, though, here too,
coarse rock doves sneer and are not fooled by marble.
Good luck to you! You worked the World’s own ways
to your best ends; and the inscription finds you great:

A Virgilio — La Patria. Your brilliant, vicious Italy!
Your modest ears would burn.
Around, Aeneas slays, and Tityrus pipes in stone; beneath
(since need finds marble irresistible)
the age has swirled its slogans round. Your triumph runs
along a stone’s four sides:

Free L.S.D.
No more madonnas, no more whores, just women….
Assassin cops kill red brigades.
Be realists; ask everything.

Cemetery of the Capuchin Friars, Rome

Cool steps of stone beside two Central Banks
lead to a cellar, some tonnes of old friars’ bones
if you can spare ten minutes and a coin.
Quello che voi siete, noi eravamo;
quello che noi siamo, voi sarete.
Death’s jury’s stacked:
four hundred pairs of sockets stare you down,
each with its name in ink upon the pate,
that cage where a tongue once flapped.
Rome’s heat, the timeless bread-and-olive stalls,
fierce traffic, fade into this gloom.
Japanese graffiti on an old friar’s knee-cap.
Wood-heaps of shin-bone; pelvic shields
like tureens heaped in a cool servery;
Comme vous nous etions; comme nous vous serez.
All tongues can let that coldness in.
No guards object: here ladies may flaunt thigh and bust;
the bones are antidote to lust.
Como vosotros nosotros eramos;
como nosotros vosotros sereis.
Thigh bones, round-tipped like tors,
muffle the tourist children’s noise
as long-divided tongues prattle and lick
for human sameness round the bones.

   Was ihr seid sind wir gewesen;
     das was wir sind werdet ihr sein.
     As you are now, so once were we.
     As we are now, you soon will be.

Outside two tourists meet. “Darling! How are you?!”
“Well, alive.”

ABOUT THE POET

MARK O’CONNOR was born in Melbourne in 1945 and graduated from Melbourne University in 1965. He has been the Australian National University’s HC Coombs Fellow and a visiting scholar in its Department of Archaeology and Natural History. His poetry shows special interests in Italy (where he spent some years), in the Barrier Reef, and in other Australian environments. He has published 15 books of verse and is the editor of OUP’s much re-printed Two Centuries of Australian Poetry. He was Australia’s ‘Olympic poet’ for the Sydney 2000 Games, with a fellowship from the Australia Council to ‘report in verse on the Games’. Visit him at www.australianpoet.com