Homer, A. D. 1982

Amy Clampitt

For Irving Kizner and his class at Hunter College

Much having traveled in the funkier realms of Ac-
ademe, aboard a grundgy elevator car,
deus ex machina reversed, to this ninth-floor
classroom, its windows grimy, where the noise of traffic,

moAvh\oioforo-daldoons-like, is chronic,
we've seen since February the stupendous candor
of the Iliad pour in, and for an hour and a
quarter at the core the great pulse was dactylic.

We've seen the clash, from those great halls, of light and dark,
the sullen campfires of a brooded-over choler,
Odysseus, rising, sway his peers with storms of logic,
the spurned priest of Apollo shrink along the shore,
and Hector's baby, shadowed by the plumes of war
as we are, pull back from his own father with a shriek.

       DODONA: ASKED OF THE ORACLE

   The female body, its creases and declivities
   leading to the sacred opening, the hollow
   whose precincts, here, neither seduce nor threaten:
   bee-hum, birdsong, side-oats' leaning awns,
   the blowing grasses (one vivid
   lizard flickers on gray stone,
   is gone); the drifting
   down of poplars; harebells,
   convolvulus. The triumph-song,
   far off, of strutting cocks
   no threat, merely ridiculous. Olympus
   a mountain range away: huge valleys
   charged with gargantuan
   foreshadowings, new-minted
   laser glints of force.
                     What lustral commerce
   might cleanse the consciousness, hallow the body,
   and renew a broken trust? Before Dione,
   the dim earlier consort, gave place
   to nagging, bitchy Hera (who for her nagging
   had, of course, good reason)
   would there have been a time
   the rustle of earth-nurtured
   oaks had meaning-when doves in flight,
   as yet unhackneyed by utopian