Author Information
At An Old Scholar's Disappointment
I remember how you lectured us
with an enthusiasm we could not resist,
despite our finest efforts to ignore it,
even during the weekends' seemingly
endless round of parties and encounters---
whores, heroin, and unlimited kegs of beer.
In those days, the style, the emphasis,
of research was attentive to the obscurist
fact, or clue, or even unproven hypothesis:
and yours was a fabulous, exotic Princess,
from some ancient kingdom, three milennia old.
Her beauty, preserved in a single image---
her beauty, beclad in sheer silk, and barefoot---
adorned your cluttered desk, and the one
empty space randomly leftover on one
wall between the massive, full bookshelves.
The courteous skepticism of scholars,
and the wisecracks of crack addicts, by and large,
were equally wasted on your devoted efforts
to find her tomb, the legendary tomb,
its treasures, and some sense of her presence,
clad in sheer silk and barefoot in that world.
Three decades quietly passed us both:
your articles, essays, and visiting lectures
proceeded unhindered as did my own
two failed marriages, and seemingly unending
debacles in an alcoholic stupor.
Then, with a moment's glance in the media,
one of your own former pupils discovered
a site . . . a step . . . a staircase . . . a door with a seal.
Entrance was delayed until your arrival
on a chartered jet provided by anonymous friends.
Your trembling hands unsealed the doorway.
Your eager eyes behld, once more, her image---
on the inner wall opposite your gaze;
her body, voluptuous in sheer silk and barefoot.
And below it, her name had been carved in living granite---
a word I never learned how to pronounce,
feminine sounding: you said it meant, Hyacinth
(the flower that is), in her language, long since dead.
I can only imagine the shocked surprise,
the muffled laughter and the averted eyes,
to find only an empty cubicle:
no treasure, no body, no trace, even, of her soul;
only the sharp sense of a history
alien to yours, that you can never plumb;
dust of an age unretrieved, and its debris;
carcasses---starved spiders, and devoured flies.
Starward
[jlc]
