The First Layer of City

1950 –

Concerning the lost and so
much of it, the Professor of Antiquities
is on TV again—

Think about that.

I love the word oxymoron like I love the word
hope loving him back such a long way.

The ancients then, via digital pulse. But never
to know except with shovel, brush,
magnifying glass. He dreams out the rest.

The rest is resting in dust. The rest too will

come out of deep down
petrified wood or gold or bronze
fierce, the spear end of it.

Not far, so many winged creatures
sculpted out of flight to peer from a ledge,
their grim human heads turned sideways, desert
a distance, a horizon. Column after column
holding up ago

what made it cool in there, made us all
the first days of the world: lie down,
close your eyes a moment,
listen to the fountain.

The Professor of Antiquities
looks into the camera as into what the Oracle saw
and says you don’t destroy,
you restore. All this time to recover
words for beer, for how-much-you-owe-me, for gods
and king, the body living or in death, what to do,
what’s elegy and next
marked on clay tablets with a stick.

First lost layer of city. Shock-seizure
of flames larger than night
after night some year B.C. burning back
temple or palace until

safe all words, safe,
slow-fired to stone in the lower chamber
when everything, everything else—

The Carnivorous Plants

in exile, ganged up in this greenhouse of living ache
and want, shabby glassed-in room with a door propped open
by a dustpan under a scribbled please, keep locked,
underlined, underlined. Who wrote that, what guardian

of the wordless deep to abet these most patient other
bullies on their bright faded stalks breathing in
my carbon, giving back oxygen, not a gift, only something
to remind: the invisible exchange—love that first.

Marianne Boruch

2018

There Ought to Be a Law Against Henry

given his showing up to teach at the U 
disheveled, jittery cigarette and cigarette and probably 
the drink, losing the very way there 
over river, river of all song, all American story 
which starts way north of St. Paul quiet or undone 
wandering south, not 
enraged mostly, something stranger. 
That’s one epic shard of John Berryman anyway.

Notorious.

Marianne Boruch

2018

Before and Every After

—in memory

Eventually one dreams the real thing.

The cave as it was, what we paid to straddle
one skinny box-turned-seat down the middle, narrow boat
made special for the state park, the wet, the tricky

passing into rock and underground river.

A single row of strangers faced front, each of us
behind another close
as dominoes to fall or we were angels lined up
politely, pre-flight, like that was
a coffin we rode, the go-to, take-out end of it,

Marianne Boruch

2014

Poems

The First Layer of City

More by this poet

The Carnivorous Plants

There Ought to Be a Law Against Henry

Before and Every After

Poems

Page submenu block

The First Layer of City

More by this poet

Newsletter Sign Up